


Though Every Drop of Water Swear Against It

by exoscopy, Tozette



Category: Original Work
Genre: Age of Sail, Alternate Universe - Pirate, Historical Inaccuracy, Pirates, a lot of piratey swearing, absurd character names, and not to be taken seriously, and occasional fluff, despite the absurd violence, it's still not really edited, like a lot of it, ridiculous location naming system, swashbuckling, this is absolute trash, when we wrote this story we did it without editing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-05-19 03:12:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5951641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exoscopy/pseuds/exoscopy, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first mate of the <i>Merry Recidivist</i> - and what kind of person called herself "Deathscream", anyway? Thank god that wasn't too ominous or anything - had led Ren down there, muttering something about 'show you your quarters', and then locked the door behind her when she'd left.</p><p>And now it was just Ren and the onions. There were a lot of them. And pickles. And for some reason, pots of what seemed to be lime jam. That was weird. Maybe they ate it all together. Maybe they couldn't afford nice food. Maybe they were smuggling onions? No, that was stupid.</p><p>None of Ren's bemused reflection on the onion problem altered the fact that the pirates had locked him in the hold of their ship, which, far from containing a mountain of pirate gold, seemed to be the repository for sixty per cent of the world's onion supply.</p><p>It occurred to Ren that perhaps he was not cut out for a life of piracy after all.</p><p>---</p><p>(Mayhem. Treasure. Escapes. Escapades. Dashing rescues. Bounty hunters. The heart of an unfriendly god. A wee bit of murder here and there. And, occasionally, actual piracy. </p><p>And onions.</p><p>A <i>lot</i> of onions.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Blind Parrot

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion story to [No Drowning Mark Upon Them by exoscopy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5891533/chapters/13579159), and I recommend checking that out, too -- if only to find out what the _other_ crazy pirate crew's getting up to!

The Blind Parrot was the sort of establishment where an offhand comment might incite a bar fight... or a riot. It was full of bitter men, watchful eyes and bloody potential. Even by the standards of dockside pubs it was a rough place.

Ren supposed that was how he could be certain he was in the right place.

Ren was nervous when he arrived, cautious of the cruel-looking men who were playing dice or cards on upturned barrels which served as tables. But Ren was enormous, and there was a heavily-scarred stretch of skin over the socket where one of his eyes ought to have been. The patrons gave him a wide berth.

The person he was meant to meet was First Mate Deathscream of the _Merry Recidivist_ , and Ren spotted her easily, all alone in a pool of lantern light at a barrel in the corner. She was ugly by description and worse in person: tall and dark-skinned with a lean, hungry face. Her skin was covered in blotchy tattoos that made Ren think of exotic skin diseases.

She looked at Ren with mean, speculative eyes.

Supposedly her captain was worse.

Ren strapped some steel to his spine and pulled up a crate. "Hi. I'm Ren."

"I can see that," said Deathscream. "You're the only one-eyed man here. Does that make it hard to hit things straight?"

"It did at first. It doesn't now."

Deathscream grunted. Then, straight to business: "You understand that if we take you, you're on board with us for at least a year or until you die. You get no pay but what you kill and an equal share of goods and coins salvaged from any ship happens to be wrecked and abandoned."

"I understand that," said Ren impatiently. "The contact said you were going to the Chastened Shoals."

Deathscream rubbed his fingers over her shaven scalp. "Sorta," she said slowly. "Near there, anyway. We can circle around if we have to. Why, you lost somebody there? Going looking for your lost love's bones? I swear to god if you're one of these hopeless romantic shitbags-"

"I lost my eye to a mermaid who makes her nest there," Ren cut her off.

Deathscream let out a surprised bark of laughter. "And you want us to take a break from our busy schedule of plunder and pillage to murder the mermaid."

"Pretty much," agreed Ren. "The ship can have anything they've got once we've killed them. But last I saw her, Blackwater Ceto was wearing my eye in a bottle around her neck, and I want it back."

Deathscream grunted again, and then leaned back and stared at him for a long moment. "Blackwater Ceto, huh?" she drawled after a moment. "You know the only reason I'm even considering this is because it's hard to kidnap good muscle. My contact said you're good. You're going to want to be _better_ than good."

Ren put his hands flat on the barrel between them. "I'm good," he said levelly.

Deathscream smiled unpleasantly. "Then let me be the first to welcome you aboard the _Merry Recidivist_. If you fuck up, you're dead."

* * *

 

Hours later, Ren nudged an onion with the toe of his boot. It rolled across the floor, gathering momentum with the swell of the tide, until it met the door with a soft thud.

The door was locked. Ren had investigated it at length.

The first mate of the _Merry Recidivist_ \- and what kind of person called herself "Deathscream", anyway? Thank god that wasn't too ominous or anything - had led Ren down there, muttering something about 'show you your quarters', and then locked the door behind her when she'd left.

And now it was just Ren and the onions. There were a lot of them. And pickles. And for some reason, pots of what seemed to be lime jam. That was weird. Maybe they ate it all together. Maybe they couldn't afford nice food. Maybe they were smuggling onions? No, that was stupid.

None of Ren's bemused reflection on the onion problem altered the fact that the pirates had locked him in the hold of their ship, which, far from containing a mountain of pirate gold, seemed to be the repository for sixty per cent of the world's onion supply.

It occurred to Ren that perhaps he was not cut out for a life of piracy after all.

It probably served him right for signing on with a bunch of thieves, low-lives and slavers, anyway.

He kicked another onion. It smacked into the first and rolled away.

After another few hours, Ren decided that since nobody was coming to release him, he should make sure he really couldn't escape before resigning himself to a lifetime of rolling in onions. He got to his feet and investigated the door again.

He had no idea about picking locks whatsoever, but the one on the door was pretty old, and didn't look all that finely wrought. It was metal, so it wasn't likely to break, but it wasn't banded across the whole door, either. The ship was conscientiously repaired, obviously cared for - but old.

Ren regarded the door for another second.

He took four steps back, crowding back against the crates, and then threw himself shoulder-first into the door.

It didn't really break, but it sagged unevenly on its hinges. Promising. Ren decided to give it another go. The door cracked and splintered and surrendered to Ren's frankly ridiculous physical bulk. He stepped out and into a below deck passageway, rolling his bruised shoulder, and then headed for the nearest patch of light, which would seem to signify a way to get to the deck above.

An escapee onion rolled along bast his boot. He saluted it as a kindred spirit and silently wished it luck.

It was sunset outside. Sunset and an endless expanse of salt water.

"Oh! _Fresh meat!_ " The scream came in a husky feminine voice. Ren flinched.

The same somebody shimmied down a rope and hit the deck flat-footed. Her skin was sun-tanned, her hair golden blond, and her smile was all sharp edges.

"You lost me a sovereign," she informed him by way of greeting, striding closer.

He had? "I what?"

"A so-ver-eign," she repeated, and poked him in the chest. "I said you'd pick the lock before sunset -" she pointed west, where the last rays of the sun were dyeing the sky a bright, bloody red.

"That's what you get for having faith in people. They'll always find a way to disappoint you."

Ren turned, putting his back to the railing and the waves, and twisted his head to catch the second person in his narrow range of vision.

This one was also blond, but the similarities stopped there. He was tall and hard-looking, and if the woman's smile had a lot of sharp edges, the man's was looking to mug you in a back alley and make off with your boots.

Ren felt even less comfortable when the man stood on his toes and slung a lean-muscled arm around his shoulders. It had been a while since he'd even met anybody tall enough to _try_ do that.

"I bet between sundown and midnight, so I think you can pay up, babe."

"You ...took bets on me?" Ren asked. He shrugged out of the scary blond's grip. It put him closer to the woman, and he didn't like that, either.

"Just a bit of good, clean fun," said the man. He really had the least friendly face Ren had ever seen. Smiling just made it worse.

"One sovereign," the woman said warningly to Ren, and then sighed and dug in her cleavage for a moment. A few seconds later, her fingers emerged victorious, clutching a rough gold coin. The edges were shaved, Ren noticed.

The man took it from her palm and touched it to his mouth. "Mmm. Still warm," he said in a low voice.

She laughed a thick, throaty laugh in response, and Ren began to feel both awkward and superfluous in equal measure. He looked around for some kind of escape. He didn't have to go far: sometime during this increasingly uncomfortable exchange, another of the crew had snuck up on him, and now he was leaning against the railing, watching Ren through a fall of shining chestnut hair.

"This will be going on for a while," he said, lifting a hand to indicate the two blonds. "Why don't I get you introduced?"

Sanity beckoned with the soft golden glow of sunshine. Ren nodded eagerly.

"That's Hellwrath," the man said, pointing at the man with the unpleasant smile. "And Meredith - she hasn't taken a name yet. She should, or somebody else's going to name her instead. I'm Blacktrance."

Ren nodded, like people naming themselves was terribly common. "Did you pick that?" he asked, trying not to sound too dumb. He couldn't imagine anybody's real name being _Blacktrance_. Or Hellwrath, for that matter.

"Yes," said Blacktrance, with a condescending look that said Ren's attempt had failed pretty spectacularly. "You've met Deathscream, because she'd have -"

"Locked me in a closet with six tonnes of onions?"

"I was going to say 'let you on', but yes, she does that too." Blacktrance's voice was deep and very soothing, and he had a surprisingly educated accent. It wasn't how Ren expected a pirate to talk.

"Happens a lot, does it?"

Blacktrance shrugged. "It's a tradition. New crewmen don't usually last very long. When she finds a new one, she locks him in and everybody makes bets on when he'll get out."

"Hilarious," Ren deapanned.

"It really is," Blacktrance agreed like he didn't understand that irony was a thing.

"What happens if he doesn't get out?"

"Fresh water's not stored down there, so they usually only last a few days."

Ren stared at him.

"Our cook makes us toss them overboard after, though. Says it's unhygienic." He sniffed. Then he caught Ren's expression. "Relax! You got out, didn't you? So don't worry about it."

"And... what did you bet?" Ren asked slowly.

Blacktrance laughed. "That you'd die in there, of course," he said cheerfully.

Ren nodded, and tried not to take it personally. Blacktrance didn't make it all that easy, though.

Somebody was going around lighting lanterns in preparation for full dark. Ren squinted, but late shadows masked his face. There was something vaguely unsettling about his movements, thought - something oddly lopsided. He... clicked, when he moved.

"Steelmind," said Blacktrance, following his gaze. "He's a little bit... odd. He likes things to be in order, and he doesn't like being interrupted. You're really much better off not bothering him." He paused for a reflective second. "I should really take you to meet the captain. He and Deathscream and Snowscar'll all probably be holed up together in the captain's cabin - here, come on -" he grabbed Ren's elbow, "-this way."

His grip was like steel. No matter how little Ren wanted to see Deathscream again, that was where they were going.

The captain's cabin was empty, but the quarterdeck wasn't. There was a large table hosting an enormous map, and a number of broad benches with bolted brass gauges and meters, none of which Ren understood. They all looked very impressive, though, and all of that wood and brass glowed soft and warm in the lantern-light.

There were three people at the table, and Ren wasn't thrilled to find his memory absolutely accurate: Deathscream was lean and hideous. Her head was shaved ( _lice_ , screamed Ren's horrified brain, _licelicelice!)_ and where Ren's face was a mess of scar tissue down one side, the first mate's was voluntarily mutilated. Her tattoos looked like some kind of wasting disease, piebald and blotchy, and they continued all along her arms and even on her feet, which were bare and dirty. Ren had grown up on the streets. He didn't mind a bit of dirt, himself - but you didn't have to glory in it.

Then Blacktrance introduced the captain as "Captain Paletouch, but there's only one Captain so just call him that."

The lean, looming menace of the first mate made Captain Paletouch... a bit of a let down, really. For a fearsome pirate whose eyes were supposed to freeze the souls of good men and all. He... he didn't even have a giant hat or a parrot. Instead he was tiny, and blond, and... and _soft-looking_. He had enormous blue eyes, which did nothing to freeze any part of anyone.

And he had no heart at all, according to rumour, but Ren wasn't stupid enough to ask him about it right to his face.

Captain looked at Ren.

Ren looked at Captain.

"How did you lose your eye?"

"Mermaids," said Ren, flatly.

Captain nodded thoughtfully. "They do that."

"Rip out people's eyes?"

"No, kill people. It's supposed to be quite nice. Like falling asleep."

"It wasn't."

"Pity." He looked at Deathscream. "Do we have room for him?"

"Not really. I thought we'd keep him in with the onions."

Captain made a vague assenting sound. "Aren't you supposed to be watching something, Blacktrance?" he suggested.

"Steelmind's still out," said Blacktrance, which seemed to make sense to the others because they made more of those vague acknowledging noises before turning back to the map.

Ren turned his attention to the last man at the table, who was gnawing on a hangnail and perusing a scrap of vellum (honest-to-god vellum, seriously, these pirates were clearly _not_ poor) with an expression of intent concentration.

"That's Snowscar," said Blacktrance in a very low voice. "Say 'hello Snowscar'," he suggested.

"'Hello, Snowscar'," Ren parroted obediently.

The man's grey eyes flicked up briefly, then returned to his scrap of vellum. He waved at Ren absently almost thirty seconds later. "Hi."

"Good, now we're done. Come on," Blacktrance had his arm again and dragged him from the cabin. It was rapidly cooling outside, but the air felt much more relaxed.

Blacktrance left him in favour of climbing high into a perch among the rigging and sails (where he apparently lived, which Ren decided not to question), and Ren settled atop some of the barrels and crates stacked against the mast to watch Hellwrath and Steelmind argue about the wisdom of lighting open fires on a wooden ship.

But Steelmind slunk away and Deathscream joined Hellwrath, and then Captain joined Deathscream. Meredith came from below carrying what looked like cloudy piss and smelled like vinegar, and Hellwrath produced a deck of cards with some filthy illustrations on their backs.

Ren was barely paying attention when a flung card struck him edge-first in the nose.

"Ante up, new boy," called Hellwrath, teeth glinting in the lantern light.

The others watched on expectantly, even Captain, whose bright eyes were shadowed by the low light and a soft fall of hair.

Ren had a sneaking suspicion that the best cards were hiding down Meredith's shirt. "Nothing to bet," he said, spreading his arms wide.

"I'll accept your boots as legal tender," Meredith said, smiling.

"You never accept _my_ boots as legal tender," complained Snowscar, setting himself down next to her with a little groan.

"You always have money," she shrugged. "And you're not built like that," she added after a pause.

"Fine," said Ren, and kicked off his boots. They were barely hanging on, anyway, and plenty of the others seemed to go about barefoot anyway . It couldn't be that awful. Unless Meredith had a collection. He eyed her with renewed suspicion while Hellwrath dealt him in.

She leaned over and offered him the bottle, smiling.

* * *

 

Ren wasn't entirely sure how he ended up back below deck with the onions or how he'd lost his shirt _and_ his boots. He did remember, vaguely, waking up shivering and crawling underneath a sack for warmth.

Now it felt like morning and he was, if possible, colder. He was also too hung over to move, so he just lay there and shivered and felt quietly but terribly miserable.

The onions weren't very warm, but they were making an effort. The onions, he began to suspect, were the only ones on board who really understood him at all.

He was so busy with feeling sorry for himself and wondering where his shirt was that he didn't notice the footsteps until somebody trod on him. He wasn't light, either.

"Ow!" he said much too loudly. His skull felt like glass. The foot on his hand retreated, thumping somewhere near his head instead.

Ren's onion friends were cruelly yanked away. There was a lantern burning somewhere, and it was quite bright. Ren whined and gingerly cracked his eye open at a pair of very polished black boots.

Slowly, he looked up.

It was somebody he'd not seen before, which was odd because he thought he'd been introduced to all members of the crew.

"Uh," he grunted very quietly, "hi." Sadly, laying half-naked under a bag of onions wasn't the worst situation in which Ren had met somebody.

The man didn't look that impressed though. His skin was extremely pale, and his hair was long and very black. He had soft grey clothing and hard grey eyes, and he didn't look very friendly. He didn't look very _un_ friendly, either, though: he was regarding Ren without much expression at all.

"Are... are these your onions?" Ren tried.

The man glanced at them. There was a pause. "I do the cooking," he said finally. "Are you sick or hung over?"

"Both," said Ren honestly. "Have you seen my shirt?" Slowly, he got to his feet. His head wobbled, but stayed on.

"The shirt Meredith is wearing seems too big to belong to Hellwrath," he said, and then seemed to deem their conversation over. He collected a sack of onions from the crate behind Ren and left.

Ren dusted himself off and followed him. "Is there a kitchen down here?"

"Yes."

It was more like a big stove and a table bolted down and locked in a room. It wasn't very well lit, but it was warm, and Ren crowded up against the old iron stove, stooping to avoid a hanging string of dried something. "Oh, yeah," he sighed, feeling the heat seep into his fingers. He glanced over at the man, expecting him to say something (perhaps just 'get out of my kitchen'; Ren wasn't fussy), but he was just silently peeling an onion.

"What're you making?" Ren wondered.

"Onion soup," said the cook. Ren thought of the crates and crates of onions in storage and supposed he might have guessed that.

"With lime jam?" he suggested lightly. He leaned too close to the stove and snatched his fingers away, sucking on the tips. Ow.

"Yes. Chop this," he added, putting a peeled onion down on the table.

"Uh," said Ren. "Just... any way?"

"It doesn't matter," said his companion.

Of course it turned out that it did matter as soon as Ren started chopping, and the man took the onion from him to demonstrate on it. It underwent some kind of deep magic and became tiny, regularly-sized pieces of onion in the space of a few seconds. The process remained something of a mystery to Ren, but he gamely accepted the challenge of it. They chopped in silence.

"I didn't get your name," said Ren after three more onions had met their doom beneath his blade. "Blacktrance introduced the others but he didn't even mention you."

"The people here had named me Icecharm," he said, and kept chopping.

Ren wondered why for all of a second, but ultimately the meaning behind that name was pretty clear. All the charm of a block of ice in winter. Yeah, he could see that.

"And you're the cook," he said into the following silence.

"Yes," Icecharm agreed. The word hung flat and hard on the empty air. It was hard to tell with how short his responses were, but he had very precise elocution and his accent was soft and extremely polished.

Ren gave up and let the silence continue uncontested. Icecharm didn't seem to find it nearly as uncomfortable as Ren did. The soup that they put together was to stay on the heat until it dissolved into an unpalatable mush.

It would take quite some time to reduce, but Icecharm seemed perfectly content to clean everything (even the things they hadn't used). Then he stared blindly at the simmering soup.

"So..." Ren said slowly, shifting from foot to foot. He was warm now, and reluctant to move away from the stove. "You're just going to stand and watch it?"

"Sometimes I sit down," Icecharm said. There was a pause and he sighed, "Or somebody may need me elsewhere. I am the ship's medic," he added.

"You do sound kind of toffy," Ren said, nodding.

"Toffy?" Icecharm repeated as though he wasn't sure about the word.

"You know," Ren waved on hand. "Been to a proper school, university, rich family, that sort of thing. Toffy."

"Yes, I have a medical degree," said Icecharm. Then, "I actually thought toffee was a food."

"It's still a food," Ren said. "Seems like you'd get a lot of work on the ship? The crew might be indestructible -" or they were by reputation, anyway - "but the slaves, at least -" he waved one arm expressively.

"I rarely have to treat slaves. We do not commonly smuggle people, and when we do Captain doesn't usually accept sick slaves. The price," he added, for clarification.

Ren frowned a little. "I thought - well, the ship's reputation -" he fumbled.

Icecharm leaned forward and stirred the pot, three times counter-clockwise, very precisely. "We do buy and sell slaves when there's no money elsewhere, or if it's particularly lucrative. War zones are usually glutted markets, for example. If we are able to take the prisoners from a war zone and sell them for ten times the price it is a very good business decision. But," he went on, setting the spoon down exactly parallel to the edge of the table, "Captain doesn't approve of the trade in general."

Ren grunted. It made sense. Horrible sense, but sense nonetheless. "And you?"

"I?"

"You don't sound like you disapprove."

Icecharm might have been staring pensively into the soup, but Ren wasn't sure he even had actual expressions, really. "If you introduce cheap slavery into modern economic systems, you devalue labour and make it more difficult for people to work. I believe," he said the word very carefully, "that trading slaves means impoverishing the lower classes and ultimately slowing the exchange of money, capital and services, so it is, broadly-speaking, a poor long-term decision."

Ren's eyes had glazed at 'economic'. "So, you do disapprove."

"You are over-simplifying," said Icecharm.

Ren was saved from having to think of a response to that by the arrival of Steelmind in the doorway. Even this morning's dim lantern light was better than last night's moon, so Ren could finally see his face. His skin was pale and nearly grey, and the tumbled bit of hair that fell over one eye was bright red. Ren was colossally unsurprised to notice a constantly-ticking muscle in his jaw. He seemed like the type. Steelmind's arms were roughly bandaged, and some of those wrappings were stained brown with old blood. He scratched restlessly at them.

"I have come to see what you are cooking."

"Onion soup," said Icecharm.

"Good, it's the same."

"It is," Icecharm agreed placidly.

"Do we have enough onions?"

"Yes, barring serious unforeseen complications on the way to Justice."

"Good. That's good. There isn't usually another person here," said Steelmind, fixing his gaze upon Ren. His irises were white and disturbing.

"It won't change the soup," said Icecharm.

"Good," Steelmind nodded. He looked at Ren again. "You're the one Hellwrath doesn't like."

"I am?" Ren frowned. "I mean, he doesn't?" It was news to him. He couldn't for the life of him think what he'd done that might have upset Hellwrath, either.

"I don't really like Hellwrath either," Steelmind shrugged.

"Okay then," said Ren, having decided to just run with it.

Steelmind regarded him for a second, and then nodded shortly. He left, dragging one foot slightly. He was still clicking faintly. False leg? That did seem terribly piratey.

Ren stared after him, unable to tell if he was as crazy as he seemed. Icecharm silently stirred the soup, and Ren knew he'd get no help there. If Steelmind was crazy, he had an awfully good grasp on the trivialities.

He thought of something. "If you're not buying slaves, why are we headed for Justice? I thought that was basically the only industry there." The only things on the island, as far as Ren knew, were the international court, a large number of marines (like all marines, largely corrupt) and the prisoners.

The fact that it was surrounded by bloodthirsty mermaids was only relevant to Ren, really.

"Snowscar believes that a map he needs is there."

"A map of what?" Ren couldn't read maps - couldn't read at all really - but he understood that they were just pictures of the way to get to one place or another.

"A map to the heart of god."

Ren blinked. The heart of god. That was ...ambitious. He almost told him that it was just a legend, but decided against it. What difference would it make if they ran into mermaids in open water or on the narrow beach of Justice?

"Does the captain want it to replace his own?" he asked instead. It struck him that he wasn't sure if he was serious or not. Maybe the captain didn't want to jam it inside his own chest, but wanting to possess such a thing... He frowned a little.

Around them, wood creaked gently. Ren was almost getting used to the sound.

"No," said Icecharm, and didn't elaborate.

Ren sighed. This was like juicing a rock. He changed tactics. "Justice is a big place, isn't it? A whole island?"

"No. The island is six and a half kilometres across. For a landmass that is quite small."

Ren wasn't really sure how far six kilometres was. By his estimation, there was 'far' and 'not far', and that had worked out for him for many years now. He didn't ask. "Does Snowscar know where on the island the map is, though?"

"I'm not aware. I won't be part of the landing party, so it concerns me only peripherally."

Ren grunted an acknowledgement. "So the _plan_ ," he said with very heavy irony, "that you know of, is to sneak into a heavily-guarded prison - lousy with marines - and steal a map that we might not know the location of, and then leave without somehow being arrested or killed. Is that right?"

"That is the plan I have heard, yes," agreed Icecharm, with great detachment. Ren wondered if there was anybody on this ship who wasn't totally oblivious to irony.

Maybe it was cursed. That happened to pirate ships with alarming regularity.

"As I said, I will be remaining with the ship."

"Sounds like an awesome plan," Ren muttered.

"I was under the impression that you wanted to travel just beyond that area to eradicate mermaids," Icecharm said.

Ren rubbed the thin, scarred skin that covered his empty eye scars itched, sometimes. He didn't bother to ask how Icecharm knew that. "Yeah."

"But you are concerned about the safety of _Snowscar's_ plan?"

Ren frowned. "I'm not asking anybody else to kill the mermaids with me, am I? I just need to get there and do it myself." And when they didn't surprise him with numbers, he was sure he'd be equal to the task.

Icecharm stilled. "If you plan to leave the ship," he said, "you should be aware that once you sail with the Recidivist, you won't be able to do honest work anywhere."

Ren snorted. "I don't know about you, but I have very few skills, exactly no money, no education, and no references. For me it's basically this or the gallows."

Icecharm glanced sideways at him.

Silence stretched. Something banged above deck. They both ignored it.

Ren sighed. "Provided Steelmind doesn't murder me in my sleep, I've got nowhere else to go - except another pirate ship."

Icecharm opened his mouth to say something, but the ship lurched suddenly, sending him staggering sideways. Ren was much heavier and better balanced, and did not lose his footing, but it was a near thing. They both directed their eyes upward; Ren frowning, Icecharm impassive.

Above them, something went _boom-crack_.

Ren steadied himself on the wall, but it didn't get better: another wild lurch, another frightening, concussive noise. The sound of splintering wood.

Icecharm put down his wooden spoon and pulled on a pair of thin, black gloves. "It will keep," he said, and together they scrambled above deck, where there was smoke and screaming thick in the air.

Ren paused, taking in the chaos.

And it _was_ chaos.

People had somehow managed to board the ship, and were struggling with the crew of the Recidivist. Their clothing was mismatched and ragged, so probably not actual marines. Maybe pirates, maybe bounty hunters, maybe privateers trying to eliminate the competition, but a deadly combination of fog and smoke obscured more details from Ren's vision.

There was a lot of yelling and screaming, and some very colourful cursing - that sounded like Deathscream - and one of the invaders was yelling over the top of it all in a truly enormous voice: "YOU ARE GRIEVOUSLY OUTNUMBERED! SURRENDER, PIRATES, AND YOU WILL BE UNHURT!"

Somebody started laughing, high and ugly like a broken hinge, and from some nearby, smoke-obscured patch of the deck Hellwrath bellowed: "KEEP YELLING, COCKSUCKER, SO I CAN FIND YOU FASTER!"

Ren couldn't suppress a harsh bark of laughter, which drew attention to him immediately from one of the invaders. It was time to stop stalling and help even those odds. This was something Ren could do, and it was good to feel useful.

The man charged him, short sword drawn. Ren neatly sidestepped the blow, smacked the man's arm away with greatly superior strength, and kneed him in the stomach. The man doubled over at the blow, and Ren took his chance to grasp his head in both hands and ram his face into a crate with an unpleasant, concussive crunch. The cut-off, gurgling yelp the man produced drew the attention of more attackers. Whoever had decided to invade the sanctity of The Merry Recidivist had a lot of men to throw away.

He kicked the next man in the face - he dropped like a brick - and then hurled himself forward to avoid whatever was coming with the displacement of air behind him. Something scored a long line down his shoulder and he swore.

He turned, just in time for the one behind him to grab him. He made a fist and punched him in the stomach. He didn't have a lot of leverage, but the angle was good so he doubled over and dropped like his knees had unhinged just the same.

The one he'd kicked in the face gathered enough of his wits to lurch up and plunge a knife into the meat of Ren's thigh. He barely felt it through the adrenalin haze. He kicked him in the gut and then in the balls.

Ren took the man's weapon off him. It looked like a toy in his hands. The short sword was slightly curved, with one sharp edge on the outside curve, and Ren didn't have much clue how to use it - but it was sharp, and it didn't take a lot of finesse to cut the throats of the three men he'd downed.

Blood spread on the wooden deck. There was something sharp and unpleasantly satisfying about reducing a person to a smear on the deck for somebody to bitch about cleaning up. Preferably somebody who wasn't Ren.

There were still more of them. Ren headed blind into the smoke and fog to find them. He passed by the mast and spied a man tied to it with fishing wire, which had cut into his neck. His face was blackened, his eyes bulging.

It wasn't a member of the _Recidivist_ 's crew, at least. As he passed, he could see that the wire had been twisted around man and mast several times, and then tied off in a jaunty bow.

The smoke moved suddenly. Ren jumped back, but he still felt a thin, burning line drawn down his face on his blind side. Why did people always aim for the blind side?

Ren turned, lunged right up into the man's personal space, and jammed his ill-gotten sword into him. He tried to pull it back out and found the curve of the blade was working against him, as were the man's splintered ribs.

The smoke was receding now, sent streaming by a sudden wind. Ren's field of vision was clear enough to see somebody stumbling out of the smoke toward him.

He left the sword in its gasping host and straightened to pay attention to this newcomer. More and more streamed after him.

Ren fell into the rhythm of violence: he delivered an extremely unsportsmanlike kick to the first man's testicles and kicked him in the face when he crumpled.

Next. He hit the next in the nose with the heel of his palm. It crunched.

Next. He received a hard slice down his right shoulder from a sword. He dislocated its wielder's shoulder and took it off him, then slashed a bright red smile across his throat.

next was already bearing down upon him. Ren stepped backward and slipped in a slick pile of entrails, which some thoughtless crew member had left laying on the deck. The man smacked Ren in the face with the heavy pommel of his sword, and Ren's nose made a dull cracking noise. He reeled, his face suddenly awash with blood. He spat it out, snarled low, and grabbed the man by the hair before roughly introducing his face to his knee. Then he did it again. Then again. It was almost meditative. Thud. Crunch. Thud.

A haze of red enveloped Ren's vision. It could have been blood, but it felt more like an extension of the soft, muffling blanket over his brain.

Something struck him on the blind side, again. Ren dropped the man, pivoted on one heel on the slick surface of the deck, and reached for the next assailant. He knocked his sword-arm away almost without even trying, and reached for his neck.

Ren was holding him up before he realised he was properly dead, and then he discarded him and slipped on the deck again, looking around and blinking. A man stumbled out of the remains of the smoke, and Ren straightened to meet him - but he looked like he'd already been more or less dealt with. Most of his face was missing, and his hands covered a large, gaping slash across his belly. Behind him the last of the smoke was streaming away.

Ren looked past the mortally wounded man at the figure emerging from that smoke.

Hellwrath looked as though somebody had taken bright red paint and rolled him in it. His long, blond hair was stringy with congealing blood. His hands were red, and one of his arms was coated in blood, and other things, well past his elbow.

He seemed to be holding a slippery loop of something bloody and slick in his hand.

Ren supposed he could guess who'd been leaving bits and pieces of people strewn across the deck. No wonder it stank more like an outhouse than an abattoir.

Casually, Hellwrath dumped his handful overboard. After a second, Ren did the same with the entrails' previous owner.

"Nice fight," said Hellwrath in a voice gone low and hoarse, looking around.

Ren looked around. He'd heard of the _Merry Recidivist's_ reputation, but he hadn't actually expected it to match the stories of complete carnage that went around the docks.

Ren realised rather distantly that he was shaking now, arms and legs trembling with stress and adrenalin, and he flinched and leaned his weight away from his left leg when he started to feel the throbbing of a stab wound. His nose also kind of hurt a lot. "Did you find the guy who was doing all the yelling?" he asked Hellwrath.

Hellwrath nodded at the bloody trail they'd left pitching the last one into the ocean. "Yep."

"Ahh."

Hellwrath squinted at him through a mask of gore. Some of it was drier than other parts, and he looked positively monstrous. Oddly, that made Ren feel a bit better. "You look shocky," he said finally.

"It's nerves. Fighting," Ren explained. His leg did kind of hurt, though, and there was an awful lot of blood on his pants. He wasn't sure how much was his.

"Here," said Hellwrath, and produced a flask from somewhere in his clothing. It was stained with blood, but not quite coated.

Ren took a pull, and the liquor hit his throat like drain cleaner. "Thanks," he croaked.

Hellwrath shrugged. Then he spied the corpse wired to the mast. "Hah!" he barked suddenly, in a huge, jovial voice. Blacktrance! Were you redecorating?"

Ren couldn't actually see Blacktrance anywhere. Remembering, he looked up, and found him perched in the rigging, legs crossed at the knee. He was spotlessly clean and quite prim-looking up there, but his smile was dark. He wore long, heavy gloves and was spinning a reel of fishing wire around one finger.

"Don't you know? It's all the rage on the mainland," he said, and smiled.

"Ren," Blacktrance added, slipping down through the ropes and fabric and bits of wood with ineffable grace and astonishing speed. He landed with a gentle _thump_ upon the deck without even a wobble. "You don't look well. Did one of the mean old bounty hunters hit you?"

Ren blinked, slowly. "I'm okay," he said, "Where's everybody else?"

"Oh," said Blacktrance, twisting a finger through his hair, "Snowscar got slit up the side. Looked nasty. I think he's being patched up. Deathscream and Captain are taking out the crew left on the other ship, I think," he said, gazing off starboard side with a little frown. "They'll be fine, don't worry about them," he added, waving one hand. "And Meredith's right behind you."

It was a mark of how quickly the tiredness had hit that Ren didn't even flinch at the idea of Meredith sneaking up on him. He looked over his shoulder and found her inspecting a corpse. Sensing the collective gaze, she looked up and waggled her fingers at them. "Not much on them," she reported resentfully. "Here," she added, holding a few bent copper coins out to Ren. "If you killed it, you can keep whatever it had on it. That's the rule."

"For people," Blacktrance added pointedly.

"Of course for people," Meredith sniffed. "For a ship, it's different. Obviously." Ren stared at the coins for much too long, so she grabbed his arm and turned his palm over to dump the coins into his hand. "Consider it something to bet with, all right?"

"Oh! Yes, do. Murder and gambling - now we just need to be drunk." Blacktrance tapped his bottom lip thoughtfully. "Have we rum? Or just gin?"

Ren paused for too long before laughing giddily. Of course. _Pirates_. "Awesome," he said, resolving not to think about it too hard. "I think I broke my nose, " he added, sinking down to the deck.

"Yeah," agreed Meredith, peering at his face. "I'd say so."

"It's okay," Blacktrance assured him with a narrow smile, "It'll draw attention away from the eye."

Ren rolled his remaining eye. As though he'd never heard _that_ before.

* * *

 

Perhaps inevitably, Ren ended up naked, face down on a rickety table in Icecharm's miniscule cabin.

He had never been able to afford a doctor before, and he'd never really thought is much of a shame: it was a word that summoned images of alleyway whores rubbing on their mercury, blood-spotted aprons and serrated saws.

His first experience involved none of those, but it certainly didn't change his outlook for the better.

"Ow," he said, gritting his teeth.

"Stop moving."

"Ow!" The needle dipped into his flesh again, and he repeated himself: " _Ow,_ fuck, _ow_."

Icecharm was suturing the long gash that crossed Ren's back. It was reasonably shallow, but it went all the way from his left shoulder to his right hip, and it was still bleeding sluggishly. He couldn't even remember receiving a slice to the back.

"Ow," he repeated.

"Excuse me," said Icecharm, interrupting his muttering very calmly. He was pretty calm in general: calm voice, steady hands, slow breathing. "That noise is usually made to indicate that you are in pain. I am aware that you are in pain, and I am addressing that. Are you making that noise for some other reason that I ought to address?"

"Yes, I - aagh -" The needle dipped again. "Shit, ow - _yes_. It's - ow! - making me feel better."

From the doorway, Blacktrance snorted back his laughter. "He means you should shut up," he said helpfully.

"Fuck you," said Ren.

When that indignity was over, they rolled him over and propped him up and Icecharm examined the stab wound on his thigh.

"You have been quite fortunate here," Icecharm said cryptically, bending low over it.

"I'll say." Annnnnd that was Blacktrance, voice heavy with innuendo. It wasn't lost on Ren, who felt decidedly uncomfortable - propped naked on a table with the tail of Icecharm's glossy black hair trailing over his thighs and the doctor's head way to close to the relevant pieces of anatomy - but Icecharm seemed wholly, and rather blissfully, oblivious.

"Yes," he murmured, looking closer. His breath was very warm. "It's missed the artery completely." He looked up, finally, and Ren sighed with relief - much to Blacktrance's obvious amusement. "I will clean it and dress it, but it is very deep. If it begins to look at all infected, I will need to address it immediately. Do you understand?"

"I get it, but -" Ren frowned. "Why?" he asked as Icecharm began to flush the wound with something that looked like water but stang a lot more. He winced.

Icecharm looked at him as though gauging where to begin and how stupid Ren might actually be. It wasn't a flattering look for either of them, really. "An infection occurs when a disease or animalcule invades your body. They are toxic, and your body reacts -"

"He means if it gets infected, you'll get sick. If you get too sick, or it gets too infected, it might kill you or he'll cut your leg off," Blacktrance interrupted. "Dead bad, alive good. Got it?"

"I'm not stupid," Ren said acidly.

Blacktrance raised an eyebrow at him. "Sure."

Ren scowled harder.

Icecharm looked from Ren's face to Blacktrance's and back to Ren's as though trying to determine what the byplay actually meant and if he needed to know about it.

Finally, he said, "If I had some morphia, this would be easier."

"If Captain picked some up on that ship, I'm sure you'll be the first to know. Until then," Blacktrance shrugged.

Icecharm nodded. Then he turned back to Ren. "Your nose should not set like that," he said flatly.

"Okay?" Ren said. He had already undergone the painful indignity of having his face poked and prodded to determine exactly how broken it was. It had seemed like the results weren't terrible, but now Ren wasn't sure.

"It is a simple break, very clean, but it is in the actual bone above the cartilage and needs to be moved, " said Icecharm.

"Ugh." Blacktrance made a disgusted noise and left with light, quick footsteps. _That_ was ominous.

Ren glanced over his shoulder at the empty doorway. "What?"

"Stay still," Icecharm suggested, and reached gently for his head.

Ren stayed still. Icecharm's hands were cool and gentle and he seemed very confident with them while touching the hot, swollen parts of Ren's face. That was a positive thing.

It still hurt like all hell when he shifted the break. The grinding of bone in his face was something he'd remember for a long time coming. It left sparks in his vision.

" _Ow_ ," he breathed, this time with feeling.

"Indeed," said Icecharm. Then he got up and began cleaning in preparation to return to cooking lunch.

Meredith took pity on him and got him pleasantly drunk when he crawled back above deck after his run in with the doctor.

"Is it always that bad when you see a doctor?" Ren wondered, staring morosely into the cloudy liquor of a half-full bottle.

Meredith, perched on the same crate Ren had busted a bounty hunter's head on that morning, made a pensive humming sound. "Well, it's not if you're actually sick, really. You can get drugs and medicine and that'll - mostly - make you feel better. The drugs are pretty awesome," she added, with feeling.

Ren grunted. He didn't really know what she was talking about, really. Some of the people he'd lived around had been rich enough to take opium, but he didn't see how it might help you when you were sick. Mostly when you were sick all that helped was waiting.

"If you're injured then, yeah, it's usually pretty bad," she shrugged.

He sighed and scrubbed a hand through his hair. He could feel the gentle, painful tug of the sutures in his back. That wasn't going to be pleasant. "How many days to Justice?"

Meredith pursed her lips and pressed a finger to her chin. "Maybe a week?" she said thoughtfully.

Ren gingerly touched his nose. A week. He sighed.

Meredith gave him a sympathetic look. She did not, however, give him his shirt back.

The onion soup, as it turned out, tasted like exactly nothing. It wasn't offensive, but it was more of a texture than a taste, and the texture wasn't that palatable. Ren wondered, vaguely, what had gone wrong.

"It's really fascinating," said Hellwrath, leaning against the battered table in the galley while they were standing around slurping up tasteless onion soup, "how you can make anything taste like nothing. Is that a skill they teach you at university?"

"No," said Icecharm.

"So it's just a natural talent you've cultivated?" Snowscar took up the questioning, scooping out a spoonful of soup and letting it slop back into his bowl. "I swear to god you could put a whole chilli plant in here and it would still taste like mush and seawater."

Icecharm looked at him for a second, but said nothing.

Ren ate his soup in silence.

"Yeah," said Deathscream, from where she was leaning in the doorway, tall and lean and heavily tanned, "the food's shit. Food's _always_ shit. If anyone else wants to cook, he's welcome to," she added in a low growl.

Nobody volunteered.

"Yeah. That's what I thought."

Icecharm silently began stacking the dishes to be rinsed and put away.

"It's not that bad," said Ren, shovelling another spoonful into his mouth. It wasn't good, but by the same token, it wasn't _bad_ , either.

"Oh, don't bother," said Meredith, adding her bowl to the pile with a wooden clatter. "He's got no ego invested in cooking and everyone knows it's shit. Come on up when you're done and I'll win your pants," she added, waving over her shoulder as she left.

"It's... _actually_ not that bad," Ren repeated, shrugging.

"I guess it's okay if you're used to eating out of gutters," Deathscream allowed, and left her bowl on the table.

"That does not sound hygienic ," Icecharm commented. He eyed Ren. "Do you need more?"

Need? Not exactly. But - "Yes, more. More is good," he said immediately, because it was absolute folly to turn down a free meal. He made grabby hands at the pot. "It's probably not, uh, clean, but it beats _not_ eating _,"_ he added.

Icecharm eyed him somehow harder.

Hellwrath snorted in what might be amusement but might as easily have been derision. He finished his food and left as well, presumably heading for wherever Meredith had gone.

"Although," Ren went on, tapping his jaw with the hot edge of his spoon, "you know, you'd be surprised at what sort of stuff people just throw out. I'm not saying it's good, but there's a lot of variety in some places. Rich bastards don't really know what they're throwing away."

"As _fascinating_ as this discussion no doubt promises to be," Snowscar drawled, "I should take a bowl of slop to Captain. If you don't mind?"

Icecharm filled a bowl and handed it to him without commenting, and then it was just Ren and Icecharm, and the thin form of Steelmind loitering outside the door.

Ren glanced at him. Steelmind darted out of the light, but he could still hear him mumbling.

Icecharm filled another bowl, left it outside the doorway, and then shut the door. He leaned against the wall until they heard Steelmind pick it up and leave.

Then he opened the door again.

"That... that Steelmind," said Ren slowly. "What does he do on the ship?"

"Supply and accounts," said Icecharm. "He's the quartermaster."

Ren didn't say it, but he quietly wondered if that was wise. "I see."

"Today he killed sixteen of the bounty hunters," Icecharm offered.

Ren blinked. He thought of that anxious, twitching person killing sixteen people. He couldn't see it, personally - but perhaps he would, if he stuck around long enough. Ominous thought.

He'd already resolved not to think too hard about murder. "Fair enough," he said instead.

Ren hadn't counted how many people he'd killed today. It wasn't the sort of thing a person liked to count, in his experience. "Were you keeping count?"

Icecharm tilted his head. His expression hadn't changed, but that forced little movement implied a sort of curiosity. "Everybody does."

"Oh," said Ren. He shoved another spoonful of tasteless mush into his mouth. Then, slowly, "Because you take whatever they have on them?" he thought of the few bent coppers in his pockets.

Icecharm nodded. He took Ren's bowl off him and propping it with the others.

There was silence while Icecharm inspected the scrapings of soup left in the pot. Ren stared at his hands. He thought about it, but he couldn't remember how many people he'd killed today. Meredith had probably fleeced him.

"Your nose is not going to be better when we arrive at Justice," Icecharm said.

Ren had been trying not to think about it. His face ached with an unpleasant throb, and the swelling made him feel freakish and lopsided. He sighed. "How long does it usually take?"

"The fracture is not a bad one," he said thoughtfully. "The bones will be stable inside a week, but I would advise you to avoid being hit in the face for a month."

"I don't know that I've gone a month without being hit in the face before," Ren said.

Icecharm just looked at him for a second. It was a very long second. Several seconds, perhaps. "Trauma will displace the fracture," he said.

Sometimes it took Ren a few moments to puzzle out what Icecharm was saying. He used a lot of big words where smaller ones would probably work just fine. "I... got that, yeah," he said, gently touching the bridge of his nose.

"You should rest tonight."

Ren opened his mouth to protest, and then shut it. Actually, a nap sounded pretty good. He was bone tired, and injured, and everything hurt. "Yeah," he agreed, standing up. "I'll go do that."

Meredith would just have to win his pants some other night. They were torn and stiff with dried blood, so he wasn't sure why she'd even want them. As he headed back through the splintered door into storage, he caught sight of the tiny, enigmatic Captain heading for the galley. He had an empty bowl in one hand and a leather bag in the other. He saw Ren, but declined to greet him, and his glassy eyes swept past him, glinting curiously in the dark.

Ren shuddered. He nudged some onions out of the way with one bare foot, and then slowly settled down, cautious about putting too much weight on his injured thigh and bending his newly-stitched back, with his head against a crate and his shoulders covered by an old onion sack.

Despite the chill and discomfort, he slept like the dead, and wasn't woken until Icecharm came to get yet more onions for breakfast.


	2. Justice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snowscar scratched Cat under the chin absently, looking a bit pained. “Well, that’s the problem. The little-known coves on Justice aren’t that little known. Either they’ll be watched by the marines because pirates might use them, or they’ll be watched by the marines because they have arrangements with pirates who do use them - who aren’t us, obviously - or better yet, they’ll be host to pirates who aren’t us because they have arrangements with the marines who may or may not be watching.”

The day was sunny, so he spent the morning above deck, watching Blacktrance and Meredith fling themselves about in the rigging, light-footed and agile. He didn't really understand what they were doing but it looked complicated and exciting.

Then Deathscream threw a brush at his face and dumped a bucket next to his foot. "Those're your bloodstains," she said, pointing vaguely. "Get off your arse and clean them the fuck up."

Ren blinked up at her for a second, surprised by the abruptness of the order. It was just long enough for Deathscream to bare her teeth and raise one tattooed eyebrow ominously, and, discretion being the better part of valour - for a value of 'valour' meaning 'let's not end up floating facedown in the ocean' - Ren got gingerly to his feet to begin scrubbing.

Deathscream watched him at it for a few moments. Then, with a short derisive noise, she turned away.

"The wind has CHANGED, assholes," she bellowed upwards at Meredith and Blacktrance, who were on either side of the mast in the crow's nest, legs dangling. "Stop chasing butterflies and trim the fucking sails!"

They jumped at the sound of her voice, glanced at the ropes and lines attached to the sails, and then leapt to undertake the mysterious and arcane set of activities which would somehow change the angle of the sails. Ren watched out of the corner of his eye, but he still couldn't tell how pulling on the lines made the sails move.

The days continued, slowly, in such a fashion: sunshine on deck, tasteless food twice a day, and Ren doing whatever job was asked of him. He had no actual understanding of how the ship travelled, making him totally unqualified for any skilled labour, but he could clean and fetch and carry as well as anybody.

At noon on the third day, Blacktrance took it upon himself to teach Ren how to patch the sails. He wasn't going to win any prizes for neatness, but when, at the end of the day he'd managed a patch without tragedy, he felt productive and oddly accomplished. He was probably a little too pleased when Blacktrance gently clapped him on his uninjured shoulder and, declaring him competent, left him to it.

He woke the fourth morning to a giant, vibrating mound of white fur kneading his stomach. Possibly, he thought, squinting at it, the creature was a cat.

Sensing that he was alert, the mound shifted and faced him with evil yellow eyes.

Cautiously, Ren picked it up around the belly, dislodging it from his chest and allowing him to sit up. "Holy shit," he muttered, looking at the cat. "You are _giant_." It would have come up to his knee, and he wasn't a small man. It was surprisingly placid in his hands, though.

Gingerly, he got up and took the cat to the galley.

Icecharm, who appeared never to sleep somehow, was already up and counting the contents of a series of small amber bottles. His movements were precise, and his skin was scrubbed white. Ren wasn't sure how he managed to stay so clean on a pirate ship in the middle of the ocean, but he was virtually the only crew member who did.

He shook that thought off and held the cat out, hands locked around its midsection. Its hind legs and tail dangled, but it didn't struggle at all. "Where does this go?" he asked.

Icecharm looked up at the intrusion, and then his eyes settled on the cat. "It's Snowscar's," he said. "It does not," he added, so calmly and levelly that it was actually distinguishable from his usual monotone by being _even more monotonous_ , "belong in my kitchen."

"What do I do with it?" Ren asked.

"You should take it back to him. Then remind him that it does not belong in my kitchen."

Ren's lips quirked around the edges. "Remind him that it does not belong in your kitchen," he repeated.

"It does not belong in my kitchen," agreed Icecharm, whose expression did not falter. "Correct."

Ren nodded, smiling because he couldn't help himself. "I'll let him know," he assured him.

It was very early morning abovedeck, and Blacktrance was peering over the aft railing, watching the black water drift. "You're up early," he said, not looking back at Ren.

"Cat," Ren said, holding it up.

Blacktrance glanced over his shoulder. "Huh. She must like you. She usually just kills rats and takes them back to Snowscar. Puts them on his bed."

Ren looked at the fluffy monster in his hands. "How... thoughtful," he said dubiously.

Blacktrance snorted softly, and pointed one imperious finger. "He was on the quarterdeck an hour ago. He's probably in with Captain."

The cat really did not seem to mind being held and carried about. This seemed strange to Ren. Most of the cats he'd encountered until now were feral rat-chasers, and used to running from humans lest they become dinner. This one was soft and fat and fluffy, and it was astonishingly trusting.

He silently promised not to eat it unless he really had to.

Snowscar turned out to be in his own cabin, a tiny space dominated by a big table over which a series of complicated charts were rolled. Shelves rattled with dark glass and wooden tubes, which housed the precious nautical charts.

He had grey eyes and a kind of colourlessly pale hair, and he gnawed uncertainly on a hangnail, hunched over a smaller chart and a pair of callipers. The room smelled, Ren thought, breathing shallowly, of the sourness of old sweat and some kind of very acidic wine.

He looked up when Ren knocked on the tarred wall. "Oh," he said, squinting. "Cat." He held out a hand. "Cat," he repeated, although this time it was addressed to the animal.

The cat squirmed in Ren's hands until he let it down. It landed soundlessly on soft paws and launched itself at Snowscar.

"Thank you. Let me guess," he drawled, cuddling the monster to him, "Icecharm wants to tell me that Cat doesn't belong in his kitchen."

"That's what he said," Ren agreed. "That's, um, common, then?"

"Icecharm disapproves of anything he thinks might be _dirty_ ," said Snowscar snidely. Then he held Cat up by her midsection and stroked the soft pad of her paw, cooing, "You're not dirty, are you?"

"Are you... talking to me?" Ren wondered. He supposed he might be a bit dirty. He hadn't bathed in a while. It didn't really seem to offend Icecharm - although Icecharm was so incapable of expressing anything that he might not know if it did. He frowned.

"No, I'm talking to Cat," said Snowscar, looking up at him with hard eyes. "Where did you find her?"

"She woke me up."

"Did she jump on your face?"

"No?"

"Oh, good. I don't have to be jealous then. Do I, baby?" he added, evidently to the cat, who put one velvety paw on his cheek and meowed plaintively.

Okay, thought Ren, that was actually kind of cute.

"Well, thanks," Snowscar went on. "I was just looking at the charts for Justice. I got a bit distracted. They're not perfect, as you can see," he waved one hand at the chart on the table.

Ren obligingly looked, but it didn't make a lot of sense to him and he wasn't sure how to discern perfection from imperfection, so he just nodded.

"But from what they do indicate, we're sailing straight into trouble."

 _Of course we are_ , thought Ren, but he didn't say it.

"The island's shaped like a crescent, see? The bay is here, including minor commercial docks... There is a chance we could disguise ourselves as a merchant vessel, but the Recidivist is built for speed, not cargo."

"Is that an obvious thing?"

"How did you even get here? Seriously? Deathscream didn't let you on here just for your pretty face, surely. Merchant vessels are fat scows," he went on without giving Ren a chance to respond, "they're flat and ugly and they wallow like - like _pigs_ ," he spat.

"Right," said Ren. He did not ask how the _Merry Recidivist_ was different because his sense of self-preservation told him not to.

Snowscar seemed to divine it somehow, though. He sighed heavily. "You're aboard a sloop-of-war," he said slowly. "A little one. With a very shallow draft."

"Okay," Ren tried to look politely interested.

Snowscar scratched his head. "Okay," he sighed. "The _Recidivist_ is built to go fast and navigate tiny, little-known coves and inlets, and she doesn't have a heap of room for cargo, and it shows."

"So you're saying that we look like we're on a pirate ship," Ren concluded finally.

"Yes."

"That's all you had to say, then," Ren pointed out. Snowscar made a noise like a kettle boiling over, which he cut off sharply. Ren decided a change of subject was in order. "So, what about tiny, little-known coves?"

Snowscar scratched Cat under the chin absently, looking a bit pained. "Well, that's the problem. The little-known coves on Justice aren't that little known. Either they'll be watched by the marines because pirates might use them, or they'll be watched by the marines because they have arrangements with pirates who do use them - who aren't us, obviously - or better yet, they'll be host to pirates who aren't us because they have arrangements with the marines who may or may not be watching."

Ren blinked, taking that in. "What does that mean?" he asked slowly.

"We're fucked," said Snowscar, rather abruptly. He dislodged Cat with a friendly shove, sending her whining to the floor in a ball of fluffy white fur. Then he carefully rolled up his map and returned it to one of many glass tubes kept in the shelves, rattling gently with the motion of the ship.

"That's it?" Ren wondered.

"It's a stupid idea to go to Justice on a pirate ship," Snowscar shrugged. "But I can't talk Captain out of it, and Deathscream doesn't want to talk Captain out of it, so that's where we're going. It's my job to make sure we get there with a minimum of chaos on the way - I have no idea how you're all going to stay alive once you're on the island.."

"Let me guess," said Ren, crossing his arms and leaning back against the doorframe, "you don't care because you're not going to be a part of the landing party."

"Do you know how hard it is to replace a good navigator?" Snowscar sniffed. "Obviously not. It'd be easier to find another captain."

"So who _will_ be going?" Ren wondered.

"Well, you're going. And Captain," said Snowscar immediately. "And Meredith always goes ashore when she gets the chance. Deathscream will stay with the ship. It's possible Blacktrance or Hellwrath will choose to go." He tapped his chin with his index finger thoughtfully. "They might not, though," he said, looking Ren up and down. "I hope you're good in a fight."

Ren thought about Icecharm's insistence that he avoid being hit in the face. "Ah, well," he said wistfully to himself. "Yeah. I don't always hit things, but when I do, they don't get back up."

Snowscar rose and smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. "Good man," he said, clapping Ren on the uninjured shoulder and using the movement to turn him toward the door. "If you don't mind, though, I have charts to look over."

He steered him out rather firmly, and Ren allowed him to do so.

* * *

 

The cove Snowscar eventually chose was very narrow and quite shallow. These were good things, according to him, because other vessels wouldn't dare to follow.

"That's because nobody ought to be insane enough to do it in the first place," Blacktrance explained to him when Ren asked.

"And that's a ...good thing?"

Blacktrance just shrugged.

Insanity aside, navigating the passage required Snowscar to argue drunkenly with most of the crew members, including one particularly noisy row with Deathscream that ended only when the captain intervened to quietly suggest they stop.

The passage itself was slow and cautious, and made the crew terribly tense.

In the end, Justice looked a lot bigger in person than it had on the map. Ren was used to cities and tight quarters, and it was strange to see such broad swathes of open space.

"Isn't anybody doing anything with it?" he asked Meredith, leaning over the railing to watch it drift quietly by as they sailed at a crawl into the cove. Meredith had kindly loaned him back his shirt so that he didn't look too obviously out of place, but she would only rent him his boots, and he didn't have the money for them. He wiggled his toes, looking at those sharp rocks. Oh, well.

"What?" she frowned at him, following his gaze. "The island?"

"All that space."

Meredith shot him an odd look. "No. It's a kilometre of coast made out of inhospitable rock in an island in the middle of nowhere, guarded by a couple hundred marines," she said. "Who would want _that_?"

Ren could think of some people who would kill for that. But he supposed they'd never make it this far. City kids, from the slums. He frowned but did not respond.

"We disembark here," said Captain, making them both jump. He was as quiet as a cat. Quieter, in fact, than Snowscar's. "Blacktrance," he added, "you're with us."

Blacktrance didn't question this, swinging down from the rigging and pulling on his long, black gloves. Ren saw him snag a reel of fishing wire as he went. Blacktrance, noticing this, winked at him.

There was a little splash as a tiny boat was lowered for them, and they rowed it to the rocky shore. There they tied the boat to an ugly, dwarfed tree and began the unsteady climb up the jagged coast to the island proper.

For some reason, Ren had expected Captain to be soft and slow, but he climbed just like a cat, too, with light steps and impossible balance. Both Meredith and Blacktance sprung nimbly up the rocky slope after him with their usual ineffable grace. Ren was left floundering behind, uncertain how to follow their quick steps.

Well, they were light and fast, that was their thing. After a few seconds of staring, perplexed, after them, Ren looked for solid handholds and hauled himself after them with brute strength. Brute strength was _his_ thing.

His newly-healed back was stinging when they made it to the top of that harsh slope, but he was only a few moments behind.

The slope plateaued and then fell to a gentle decline, revealing patches of lush vegetation cut through by large swathes of empty dirt and squat, ugly buildings, which sprawled in a haphazard way that suggested a process of growth as the population increased, rather than of any particular planning.

"The map will be in the officers' quarters," said Captain confidently.

Of course it would, Ren thought without any real surprise. Gingerly, he touched his nose. It was no longer swollen, and it didn't send lancing pain through his head anymore, but he wasn't keen on being hit in the face any time soon.

Captain was pointing at one of the less slap-dash buildings. It was, predictably, surrounded by other, smaller buildings. "It should be on the top floor, and not hard to find."

"Hmm... so the challenge is just getting in and out," Blacktrance considered, shielding his eyes from the sun.

"Because that sounds so straightforward," Ren said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

"Yes," agreed Blacktrance, nodding blithely. He glanced sideways at Captain and Meredith. "Shouldn't pose too much difficulty."

Meredith grunted, gnawing her bottom lip. "I don't know that I'd go that far," she said after a moment.

Captain, apparently deciding that their time for idle chit chat was up, moved forward at a rolling, easy walk.

Ren scowled. "This is a _terrible_ idea," he reminded the others.

"Just act like it's _not_ a terrible idea," Blacktrance told him in the tone of one dispensing great and valuable wisdom. "Sometimes a plan works out best when you just, you know, brazen it out."

"He's right," Meredith nodded sagely. "Audacity is key."

"The key to _what_?" Ren wondered, catching up easily because his legs were much longer.

They both reflected on this for a moment. "Not sure, really," said Blacktrance rather cheerfully. "But _audacity._ "

Meredith spoke over the top of him, waving one arm expressively: "The key to excitement, to _victory_ , to the night, to success!"

At this, Captain glanced over his shoulder. The conversation became immediately subdued under his glassy blue gaze. Quietly, he turned back to face the way they were walking, and all three of them were relieved by this.

Not for the first time, Ren wondered if maybe the stories were true, maybe he truly did have no heart. Or maybe not those stories, particularly, but - something was odd about him, and Ren was not certain he wished to know what.

"Right," said Ren, looking away from Captain's back. He almost decided he didn't want to know after all, but he had to ask. "Okay. So what _is_ the plan?"

Meredith gave him one of those short, enigmatic smiles. "We thought we'd just pop on up there and ask politely," she said, lips curving sweetly around the words.

"Right," Ren sighed again. "But seriously? Is there even a plan? Blacktrance?"

Blacktrance just smiled, a flash of oddly white teeth in his dark skin. "Keep up, Ren."

There wasn't much life around the buildings, and what there was seemed dull: marine patrols, men in uniform scuffing their boots in the dirt and smoking, a few poor, enterprising bastards who'd decided to take up primary industry around the marine base, and a yard full of scarred prisoners, chained together, who were undertaking some kind of repetitive menial labour. They looked to Ren like they might be mining for something.

Their tiny captain walked straight past all this, his blond hair glinting in the morning light, and ignored all of the curious looks they received.

Audacity. Right. Ren swallowed. His throat felt dry.

He followed Captain, trying not to feel like he had a giant, burning target on his back.

Together, the four of them walked directly to the stone building Captain had pointed out earlier, passing by the smaller, sprawling structures with their loose groupings of sharp-eyed marines.

The building seemed to double as some kind of administrative hub, with a wooden desk stuffed with papers and a wall covered with notes and posters. They paused in front of those notices while Captain approached the duty officer.

Ren started when he saw Deathscream's lean, hungry face glowering up at him from a surprisingly accurate artist's rendering. He supposed those tattoos were hard to forget. Next to him, Blacktrance whistled quietly. "Six hundred sovereigns. Christ, we should turn her in."

"What did she _do_?" Ren wondered. Six hundred sovereigns was more than enough to purchase the _Merry Recidivis_ t, as far as he knew.

"Am I on here?" Meredith wondered, ruffling the renderings as she hunted through the ones partially obscured. "Hey, that guy looks like you," she added, ripping one down and showing it to Ren.

It did kind of look like him, but the man in the picture had both eyes and shorter hair. The picture made it hard to discern his age. Ren frowned.

"'Of freakish size', " Blacktrance muttered, glancing sideways at Ren. "Something you want to tell us? This is worth eight hundred sovereigns," he added.

"It's not _me_ ," Ren hissed back.

"No," said Blacktrance speculatively, "but it _could_ be."

"It also says 'of wrathful temper'," Meredith pointed out lightly, and then, "Also, it's been marked." She tapped the corner of the poster with one fingertip. "Somebody brought him in. That's why it was under the others. Meanwhile, look at _that_ ," she pointed at another of them.

Blacktrance make a sound like a kettle boiling over. "Oh!" He touched his chest with one hand. "Oh, look, Meredith, our baby's all grown up."

"Who is that meant to be?" Ren tilted his head, squinting.

"Icecharm," Meredith snickered. "For an itty bitty ten sovereigns. Adorable."

Ren could not think of a less likely pirate to have his own wanted poster. And also it did not look anything like him. It was an image suggesting somebody a lot larger and a lot scarier, and some artistic fool had gone and given that face an expression. "What..."

"'Unprovoked attacks on an officer of the crown', hmm? Must be for shooting that officer in Havenstower," Blacktrance tapped his chin.

"It was unprovoked, actually," Meredith said quietly to Ren. "He can't aim for shit. Anything further than point blank and it's: _watch out, bystanders!_ Didn't know the poor bastard had died, though."

"Somebody should take that pistol off him before he shoots himself in the face," Blacktrance said, shaking his head. The movement sent a spill of silky brown hair around his shoulders. "Then where would we be? How do you set bones without a face?"

"He _is_ good at the bone setting. And he's never tried to cut off anything," Meredith agreed. "We'd better keep him if we can. Take it," she suggested. "Nobody else needs to see it - oh, and we can hang it in the galley!"

Blacktrance laughed softly, but he tucked the crumpled notice inside his shirt.

While they'd been fooling around, Captain had marched on up to the desk and was addressing the officer on duty directly: "I, and my sister, have business with Lieutenant Saunderson," he said quite firmly, loudly enough to carry back to them.

The officer on duty, a medium-height man with curling dark hair, a very neat uniform and a concerned expression, frowned at that. "What sort of business?"

" _Private_ business," Captain said, rather sharply. "Meredith," he added, and she scurried forward to attend him.

The officer's eyes drifted over her. "Oh _."_

Contrary to Ren's expectation, the man did not immediately discern on looking at her that they were pirates and have them hauled away. In fact, he just sighed and looked like he was fighting not to stare at Meredith. "Again? Really?" He shook his head. "He's the second door on the second floor."

And they climbed the stairs up.

"That's _it_?" Ren muttered to Blacktrance.

"Easy, wasn't it?" he beamed back.

"Okay, stud," Meredith fell back to walk with them, and Ren blinked at this new, faintly disturbing appellation. "The good lieutenant isn't going to think we're here to see him about my dubious virtue, so when he opens the door, you're going to gently subdue him."

"What does 'subdue' mean?"

"Make him quiet," Blacktrance translated helpfully. "Try not to kill him unless we have to. Pirates who go out of their way to murder marines can have pretty short careers," he added pointedly.

Ren nodded. He could imagine that. Better than he could imagine Meredith with virtue, anyway.

In the end, it was quite easy. Meredith knocked on the brass-plated door of the lieutenant's room, and the man answered inside a minute, throwing the door open and looking vastly irritated.

Ren got an impression of a broad face with broken capillaries and dark eyes before he balled up his fist and slugged the man in the gut. The punch winded him, and he leaned forward, eyes watering, breath coming short. Ren knew from experience that it was always hard to yell when someone slugged you in the gut.

Blacktrance slithered past them in the doorway, hooked a sharp line of fishing wire around the lieutenant's neck and pulled him upright. The man recovered enough to draw in a breath, and then his eyes flicked toward him, alarmed, as the wire went taut against his throat.

"Shhh," said Blacktrance, holding one wire-wrapped fingertip in front of his lips, smiling secretively at the lieutenant from under his eyelashes.

They slipped into the room. Ren closed the door behind them.

"Lock it," said Captain in his small, soft voice, even as he began to look around the room. Ren did.

Captain and Meredith went through the room like a whirlwind, tossing things aside and ripping things open, scattering documents and curios and clothes across the floor.

"What do you want?" asked Lieutenant Saunderson. He was unable to turn his head without risking his throat to Blacktrance's wire, but his pale eyes followed their progress.

"Make him quiet, Ren!" Captain's voice cut the air like a whip.

Ren shrugged, and hit him in the gut again. Blacktrance kindly loosened the wire so he didn't hurt himself when he doubled over, gasping.

"Shh, now," said Blacktrance, drawing him back upright with gentle, frightening hands on the sides of his neck, drawing him up with the wire's constant pressure. Ren could see the whites of the man's eyes as he moved. "We don't negotiate with terrorists," he whispered to the marine.

Ren fought back a snort of laughter.

"Hey, look! Do you think you'd fit into his boots, stud?" Meredith asked sweetly.

"No, he wouldn't," said Blacktrance inspecting their feet, "But I totally would. Take them for me. Ren wants his coat if you can find it."

"I do?"

"Um, yes. You do."

"Excellent," breathed Captain. He held up a skinny glass tube he'd pulled from behind a battered bible. Quickly he uncapped it, and pulled a rolled up piece of paper out into the daylight. "Yes, this is it," he said, staring intently at the chart. Ren could see only a corner from where he stood, but it definitely looked old.

Captain sighed softly, then returned the paper, popped the cork back in and stowed it inside his coat. "We can leave," he informed the others. "Meredith?"

She looked at him blankly for a second. Then, "Oh!" and she dug inside her cleavage and with a bit of shuffling and a lot of very interesting jiggling withdrew a small black case. When she opened it, there was a tiny brass syringe inside.

Ren had never seen a syringe. The brass and glass of it was interesting, and it looked expensive.

The lieutenant, however, went white when he saw it. "No, I -" he looked at Ren, flinched, and stopped talking. Ren felt obscurely proud.

"Atta boy," Meredith smiled, all sharp edges, and leaned closer. "Won't hurt, really. Just a bit of a pinch, and then you'll doze for a while and forget all about us, and we won't have to -" she was drowned out by the sudden _boom-_ _ **crack**_ of gunfire.

The four pirates froze. A thin line of blood appeared along the edge of Blacktrance's fishing wire, but they were all so intent they didn't notice.

Footsteps clattered and voices rose in the corridor outside. Somebody stopped outside the lieutenant's door and banged with a heavy hand, then tried the handle and found it locked. Then he started to yell: "Lieutenant Saunderson! Lieutenant!" his voice hit a strange new pitch and cracked appallingly. "There's been a break out! Lieutenant! Sir!"

Quietly, Blacktance slipped his soft-gloved fingers over the lieutenant's mouth. Nobody moved.

After a few more moments' fruitless banging, the marine at the door muttered to himself, cursed, and ran away again.

"Hold that thought," Captain said to Meredith, indicating the syringe with a wave of one hand. She paused.

The other three kept their eyes on Lieutenant Saunderson as though looking away might prompt him to disappear, so Ren took a cautious peek out the window onto the commotion below.

There was another dull, muddy work yard in view of the window, where some of the prisoners were put to work doing something - perhaps sawing wood, from the mess of discarded logs and tools that Ren could see.

Whatever they were meant to be doing, it probably didn't involve bludgeoning their guards to insensibility and climbing the stout walls surrounding their yard, but that was what the yelling was all about. It almost didn't look real from the lofty vantage of two stories above, but as Ren watched, one of the marines recovered enough to take aim with his pistol. The black powder ignited with a _crack_ , and a prisoner fell screaming to his knees.

"The prisoners are rioting," he said over his shoulder to the room. "I don't think it's going to go well for..." he felt the words slow in his mouth as one of the prisoners, a tank of a man with the same auburn-red hair hair as Ren, emerged from beneath a pile of struggling marines, shaking them off like droplets of water.

With an enraged bellow, the man picked himself up and ran at the walls - quite in defiance of the sudden escalation of the panic and gunfire around him - and hurled himself over.

"I've changed my mind," he said slowly, watching the marines' pursuit with the vague suspicion that it was going to end very poorly for them. The prisoner below landed on a marine and brained the man with his own weapon with a deadly efficiency that made Ren hold his breath.

The yelling turned to screaming very quickly. Ren caught the word 'devil' and the word 'monster', and decided he'd heard enough.

"The marines are all going to die. I think we have to get out of here."

Meredith peered over his shoulder. "Holy shit, it's that guy from the poster! He's _at least_ as big as you, stud. Look at those _arms_. _Un-_ ffff. We should -"

" _Leave right now -"_ Ren said desperately.

"- get him to sign his picture!"

"Be quiet, please," said Captain, from unexpectedly close behind them, and the room fell immediately silent. "The riot looks like it will take some time, and quite a few casualties, to quiet - save Icecharm's precious physick, Meredith. That man's running this way, isn't he?"

"Uh, looks like it," said Ren. "Although why he'd want to cut through the officers' quarters -"

"That doesn't matter," said Captain, sighing. "This is going to make this somewhat more complicated," he said, turning back to the room's interior and tapping his chin with one finger. His hands were small and very pale.

Blacktrance was patiently waiting for them to decide, murmuring sweet nothings to Lieutenant Saunderson, who was looking ever more white-faced and faint. Whatever he was telling him, Ren thought it probably wasn't anything nice.

Captain circled around behind them, let Blacktrance lean away, pulled a knife from his coat - and very calmly rammed it into the back of the lieutenant's neck. The man went limp immediately. He didn't seem to get the chance to notice he was dying.

Ren looked at him. He waited for a second for some kind of feeling to assert itself, but it didn't. Oh, well.

"Ren," Captain said, withdrawing the knife. "Toss him out the window. It'll add to the confusion, and we're going in the opposite direction."

There was a minimum of blood from Captain's neat kill, and what there was got soaked up in the lieutenant's clothing. Ren heaved him up - which pulled unpleasantly on the stitches in his back, and he could feel a sad little _pop_ that he supposed wasn't very good - and tumbled the dead weight out the window with a low grunt.

He hadn't actually realised that the tank-man had made it that far, so it was something of a shock to see that he'd dropped the body of the marine on top of him.

It was more of a shock to see him kick it aside like it weighed approximately as much as a football and keep running, bellowing that Ren's mother was a cheap whore.

"Ouch," said Meredith, patting his shoulder. "Rude."

"Well, she was," Ren said, a bit absently. He picked up his brand new, never-going-to-fit coat and tossed it over his shoulder.

"Oh. Well, it's still not nice to _judge_ ," said Meredith, tossing Blacktrance his boots.

They quietly shut the door behind them when they left. Some unspoken system put Meredith at the front and Ren at the back.

They saw some panicked marines racing about on their way down the stairs, but none of the men paid attention to them and they did them the same courtesy in return.

They came out at the bottom of the stairwell just in time for the duty officer's broken body to slump to a stop at Meredith's toes.

The rest of the room was in chaos. Bodies littered the floor, and marines panicked and screamed conflicting orders at each other, and poorly aimed pistols were waved in the air. One of these fired with a crack somewhere on Ren's blind side. He flinched.

In the middle of it all was the man from the wanted poster, smiling a bright and beatific smile through a mask of blood. Up close, he didn't look very much like Ren at all. He was mountainously huge, muscled like a racehorse, and roughly the same overall colouring; traits which in their rarity made the two seem more similar than they really were.

For one, Ren thought, the man had both his eyes. Lucky bastard.

These eyes were fixed on Meredith first, and then they flicked across the other three.

"Do you even know where you're going?" yelled a tiny, white-skinned boy from the doorway, where he was yanking a much-bloodied knife from a shrieking marine's belly. The boy slit the marine's throat without even looking, still scowling up at the giant.

"I know _exactly_ where I'm going," said the man, with mean irony, in a voice like crushed glass. And then he returned his attention to the marines. Effortlessly, he wrenched somebody's arm out of joint and used him as a shield.

Ren was just as happy to be ignored by those two. He snapped a hand over Meredith's mouth to stop her calling out to the man - or, for mercy's sake, begging for an autograph. "Let's go," he growled into her ear, hunching down to get close enough.

Meredith went still and her eyes flicked back to him for a second. Then she licked his palm.

"Ugh!" He jerked away.

"Let's go," she agreed in a low voice.

Captain seemed to come to the same conclusion at the same time. "We run," he hissed to them.

Blacktrance gave a sharp nod, and Ren saw his fingers twist around a coil of wire. He felt much the same. It was shadowed and walled in the stairwell - once they left its safety, they'd be in a lot of danger from flailing, heavily-armed marines and apparently random gunfire.

The door wasn't that far.

Ren took a deep breath.

They ran.

Unfortunately, it wasn't as straightforward as it seemed. Bodies were moving rapidly and uncontrolled through the room, and they had to dodge around them or risk becoming a part of the confusion of shining steel and booming voices. In the middle of the room, whirling chaos gave way to the crack of bones and the increasingly rough gasping of the (apparently _unstoppable)_ decidedly ex- prisoner.

Ren collided with a marine about halfway through, knocked him to the ground and kept going, stumbling over his body.

Blacktrance was _fast_. Somehow that wasn't so surprising. What was surprising was Captain keeping up with him, light on his toes and moving swiftly and easily through the chaos.

A chunk of wood flew past Ren's head. He didn't bother looking back to find out what had happened to the desk to cause that to be possible. He just ran harder.

In the chaos of screaming, shooting and - increasingly - the prisoner's ragged laughter, Ren barely registered the sound of another gunshot.

He did see it when the glass canister containing the map fell from Captain's coat in a bloody streak. It hit the ground and shattered.

Captain stumbled and turned back. He scrambled after the map, fingers fumbling on the flagstones.

Ren glanced at the map quickly. It was ripped, its careful lines obscured by splashes of bright blood, and covered in broken glass. A marine stepped back onto it, grinding the delicate paper into the ground. It tore some more.

Yeah, no. If there was a way to fix that, Ren didn't know it.

Captain was light. He didn't even break pace. "I've got him! Go - _go_!" He yelled to Blacktrance, who took him at his word and kept running.

"Map!" shrieked Captain, in a voice harder and more aggrieved than Ren had thought him capable of.

"It's gone!" Ren yelled back at him, hoping to still his squirming. It wasn't very powerful squirming, which suggested bad things about that gunshot wound.

They passed the tiny boy in the doorway, who was quickly accumulating his own pile of marines. He darted into the mess as Ren passed, pulling a man off the prisoner's back by his hair and neatly cutting his throat.

" _Tair_!" The boy - who might actually be a girl - yelled in a high voice. "We need to _go_ , you stupid sack of shit! Stop dicking around!"

Ren ran straight past her, hampered only slightly by Captain's weight over one shoulder. Daylight seemed very bright against his eyes. Marines were streaming toward the building. He wondered how the pair inside were going to fare with an extra fifty marines climbing over them. Didn't really seem fair, did it?

Thoughtfully, he body-checked one of them accidentally-on-purpose, knocking his legs out from under him. It was easy to knock people over when you were six and a half feet tall, and Ren felt a little glow of satisfaction when the one behind him stumbled over his friend.

"Sorry, officer!" he yelled over his shoulder, readjusting for Captain's weight. He still seemed to be breathing. That was good. Breathing was excellent.

Blacktrance didn't seem to be in any hurry to slow down, and Meredith was running in step with Ren behind him. Ren didn't know how to fix gunshot wounds, and he didn't expect the others did, either. The best option seemed to keep going as fast as they could and get Captain back to the ship and its surgeon.

Ren did slow down over the intervening kilometres, which seemed to become about five times longer with the extra weight, but his stride was long and the distance diminished rapidly. The dirty white sails of the _Merry Recidivist_ became visible well within the hour, and they all noticeably relaxed.

This effect was entirely reversed when they noticed a second set of sails.

"Shit," said Meredith, quite succinctly, and she and Blacktrance broke out the last of their energy powering ahead.

Ren contemplated it, but he wasn't sure he had it in him. He stuck to his pace.

The ship that was definitely not the _Merry Recidivist_ was not that dissimilar, but bigger. It looked like a neat navy salvage job, and had a notable lack of identifying marks. Pirates, Ren supposed, which meant that at least they were unlikely to have more than one ship.

He wondered what they would do about them.

Ignore them, hopefully. Maybe they could still get out of this without anybody dying.

The trip down the sharp rocky incline to the shore was a lot quicker than the climb up, and also approximately twelve times more terrifying. Blacktrance and Meredith were waiting at the bottom, ready with the boat, and Ren could see Icecharm's sharp, straight-spined silhouette on the quarterdeck. There was a shadow at his feet which looked like a surgeon's kit, which Ren noted with quiet relief.

He dumped himself and Captain into the boat, and they made their slow way back to the _Recidivist_.

Icecharm was there as soon as they'd hauled Captain aboard, and he was quick and efficient about his work. "Leg wound," he reported calmly upon examining him. "Pistol?" he queried.

Ren said nothing, still catching his breath, so Meredith nodded, "Yes. He fell after."

"Broken bone," Icecharm agreed rather placidly. " I don't see an exit wound."

Ren winced. That sounded bad. He saw Icecharm reach for a scalpel and decided his attention was better warranted elsewhere. Like, _anywhere_ else.

Steelmind was pacing the quarterdeck, muttering to himself and staring at the other ship across the narrow cove. Ren could make out a silhouette on the bigger ship's deck, but it was mostly an impression of giant, waving feathers. It took him a moment to figure out if it was human or not - and then he realised it was a giant hat.

He hadn't realised you could get hats that big.

"That's the _Nimble Fingers_ ," Blacktrance said, following his gaze.

"How do you even know that?"

"It's my job to know," said Blacktrance, shrugging. "I know who's wanted, what their price is, and what ship is which. Mostly the _Fingers_ is identified by her captain's ridiculous fucking hat," he tapped his lower lip with one finger, frowning.

"I see," said Ren, because he really did.

"The _Nimble Fingers_ is... Captain Malai has a reputation for collateral damage. Not much on the guns," he added, pointing to the single gun deck, which indeed did not seem heavily populated by actual guns, "but her crew is supposed to be..." he paused, looking for the word.

Ren had a sudden suspicion regarding the prisoner and the small girl they'd left on the island. "Yeah, okay," he said. He looked out at the ship. She didn't seem like much, but he looked around at the _Recidivist_ and thought about how deceiving looks could be.

"Don't worry your pretty head about it," he advised. "We don't want to start a fight with them, no. But if they start one, we'll finish it." Ren could hear him smiling, but he could also hear the steel in his tone.

He looked sideways at him. Blacktrance's silky hair was whipped around his face by the wind. The run had given his face a soft flush, almost hard to detect beneath his skin tone, and he was regarding the _Nimble Fingers_ with hooded eyes and a pugnacious set to his shoulders.

"You're... really pretty," Ren said, sounding confused even to his own hearing.

Blacktrance blinked at him, distracted from staring at the other ship. His brown eyes lost their hard edge when he looked at Ren. "Yes. I know."

The actual words caught up to Ren and he winced a little. "Er. I mean -"

"I know," Blacktrance patted his bicep consolingly. "It sneaks up on people sometimes. Are you alright?" he added. "You're shaking?"

Ren frowned at his arm where Blacktrance's warm hand was in contact with it. It hadn't felt like that hard a run, but the adrenalin was wearing down and now he was beginning to shake. He shook his head. "I'm sure I'm fine."

Almost as though the phrase 'I'm fine' had summoned his attention, Icecharm glanced sharply up at them. "You," he said imperiously to Ren, "will wait in the galley."

It was not a voice to be disobeyed. "All right," he agreed, pointedly not looking at the bloody mess of Captain's leg, and headed that way directly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story continues to be weird and a bit dodgily written! If you're keeping up, the stint at Justice coincides with Chapter Two of exoscopy's delightful _No Drowning Mark Upon Them_. :)
> 
> Otherwise, you're welcome to drop me a comment if there's something you particularly like -- although I'm pretty aware that my side of the whole pirates universe is very haphazardly written! :P


	3. A Pirate's Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “She never paid an honest coin for what she could steal, and that woman could steal anything with two ends - they say she stole the lost treasure of Snagov monastery,” he whispered, “and spent it on a hat.”
> 
> “On a hat,” said Meredith, a bit flatly. 
> 
> “Did you _miss_ the hat?” Ren asked her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you haven't kept up with [No Drowning Mark Upon Them by exoscopy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5891533/chapters/13579159), the _Nimble Fingers_ is their crew of bloodthirsty pirates. They're mentioned in this chapter, along with rumours about them! It's not **required** reading, but it will definitely add depth and context so I recommend it.

Ren stood in the tiny kitchen, hands splayed on the bolted wooden bench, and tried to stare his his fingers into stillness. They kept shaking.

His muscles felt rather suddenly like jelly. He sat, slowly, on the floor, careful of his back. It still hurt. At this stage he might just count himself lucky to have avoided being hit in the face and breaking his nose all over again.

At any rate, it didn't sound as though the crew of the _Nimble Fingers_ was any closer to boarding The Recidivist and murdering everybody. He'd probably hear that over the clatter of boots abovedeck and the steady creak of the wood all around.

Ren concentrated on breathing slowly and carefully, and not shaking.

There was a difference of feeling between the swell of waves against a stationary ship and the feel of movement. Ren supposed they must have somehow negotiated their way out of any confrontation with the other pirates. If they were really visiting Justice just to pick up their crew mate, it should have been relatively easy - but he wasn't entirely certain of Steelmind's ability to successfully complete even relatively easy negotiations.

He seemed an... odd choice.

Shortly after, Icecharm appeared in the doorway, black physician's bag firmly in hand. Ren tried hard to assign him an expression and eventually settled on 'tired, possibly'. There was blood on his apron, so he had come directly from attending to Captain's leg.

He inspected Ren's eyes and made him stand up and balance himself, and then touched his skin with hands that felt like ice.

"Is he going to be okay?" Ren asked, flinching away when Icecharm pressed his freezing fingers to the big pulse in his neck.

"If he rests it."

"And the other ship?"

"Is not a threat. We'll be in open waters in a few minutes. Once we're free they won't catch up." He gently examined his nose, and then, apparently satisfied with that, said, "Show me your back."

Ren pulled his loaned shirt off and turned around.

Icecharm did not touch his skin for a few long seconds. "I suppose you can't see how infected this is," he said finally.

"Oh." Ren closed his eye and sighed. "Is it very bad?"

"It is flushed by an increased flow of blood, and swollen," he touched the edge of the cut gently - "and hot -" he carefully applied pressure. Ren didn't so much flinch as jerk. He felt something in his back give, a strange pop that wasn't quite like ripping a stitch. "That hurts? - Yes, I see. Painful, then. And exhibiting an excess of pus," he added, in a tone with a faintly displeased edge to it. "So, yes. That is bad. Turn," he commanded, and Ren did.

There may have been some expression in Icecharm's voice, but nothing showed on his face. Icecharm's face was like a pale sculpture carved by somebody with great skill and very little inspiration.

His gaze was roughly level with Ren's collarbone.

"All right," he said meeting Ren's eyes. "With regard to the heat of it, I am going to cut it back open, clean it out, and sew it shut again."

"That sounds... very bad," Ren said slowly.

"I'm afraid this isn't something I can amputate if it festers," Icecharm responded flatly. "But you don't have a fever yet, and it is currently still living flesh, " he added, which would have been a lot more comforting if Ren had actually contemplated that he might be _rotting_ before that moment. "I advise this course of action with the expectation that you would prefer to remain alive. If not, please notify me directly. I assure you I am already well in violation of my physician's oath."

"Right," said Ren, feeling his stomach leap alarmingly. "Okay."

Icecharm took him to his cabin, which Ren remembered only as the tremendously unpleasant place in which the surgeon had set his nose. He was less hampered by shock this time, and glanced around to find that it was not as terrible as all that: like all of the rooms on the ship, it was cramped, but it was also somehow cleaner than everywhere else on the wood seemed a few shades lighter from intense scrubbing, and everything smelled strongly of...

"Uh," said Ren nervously, "Is that gin?"

"The spirit is one we acquired on the bounty hunters' ship, but I do not think it is gin, precisely. It's flavoured with juniper, though."

Ren did not feel that this really answered his implied question, but he supposed that Icecharm might require it to be a less subtle. "You're not drunk, though, right?"

That did make Icecharm pause. He blinked once, much like any person might if he were surprised, and Ren felt suddenly and terribly guilty.

"I don't drink," he said a bit stiffly.

"Right," said Ren. "Right, okay. Sure. It just smells -"

"The spirit," Icecharm cut him off, which was all the indication Ren received that he might be a bit offended, "is very alcoholic. It isn't as good as surgical spirit, but it is a good cleansing agent, and will kill lice."

"You have lice?" It was a common problem, particularly on ships. Ren glanced at his hair. It was inky black, extremely clean, and very fine-looking. It was informal and well out of fashion for somebody as rich as he seemed, but lice would have been noticeable. There were other places they could be, though.

Icecharm looked a him, and there was finally an expression on his pale face. Mostly it was disgust. "No," he said. "I do not have lice. Neither," he added, as though he thought Ren might be very slow indeed, "does anybody else aboard."

"Oh," Ren swallowed. In hindsight he probably couldn't imagine Icecharm with lice. "Right." Then he decided to shut up before he found himself in the unenviable position of having seriously antagonised the surgeon about to slice him up.

Icecharm looked at him for a few long moments, and Ren twitched and fidgeted.

"Are you waiting for something?" Icecharm asked finally.

"What?" Ren paused. "Oh," he said, and awkwardly climbed on the table, from where Icecharm could actually reach all of his back.

Icecharm cut the stitches and pulled them out carefully. It hurt, in part because of the infection, but not very much. By the time they were halfway down his back, Ren had lost a little of his tension.

"So," he said, trying not to squirm under Icecharm's careful hands, "How likely is it for, uh, festering, to be a thing?"

He picked another stitch. "I would be much more confident if we had any relevant medicines," he said, which was not at all comforting. He moved onto the next stitch. "Ships are dirty places, so it is common for this sort of thing to become complicated. But you're healthy enough, and your body has natural defences."

Ren, who had wanted to be told 'no you're not going to die horribly' quite badly, subsided into a thoughtful, if anxious, silence. Icecharm continued to pick out the stitches.

He finished this in silence, and then with little warning, sliced a neat line down the swollen injury with a very sharp scalpel.

Ren jumped, yelped, and clutched the sides of the table, eyes watering. It hurt well beyond the initial wound, burning down into his skin and radiating outward.

"Ow, shit, _ow_ ," he said, pressing his face to the table. His nose throbbed, which migrated to his head in short order, and he turned his head, making a low and unhappy noise.

Icecharm ungently lanced and drained a number of the more painful, swollen areas of skin on his back.

"Oh my god. Why does everything have to _hurt_?" he whined.

Icecharm was silent for a while, carefully rinsing the wounds with precious freshwater. He seemed to reflect on the question for much longer than Ren might have expected.

There was the sound of a bottle being uncorked. "My sister used to say that pain the best way to know you are alive," he said pensively.

Then he poured spirits over the wound.

Ren swore.

Stitching it up hurt a lot more this time, both because he wasn't high on post-battle adrenalin and because the injury was much more inflamed. When he was done, he washed it down with yet more of the stinging spirit and wrapped it in bandages that felt like they were probably cleaner than Ren's skin.

He gave Ren the bottle, which was half empty now. There was still enough in there to make him reasonably intoxicated, though. "Drink this and go to sleep."

When Ren returned to storage to sleep, he found that somebody - probably Blacktrance - had dropped off the coat he'd taken from the marine base. He touched the heavy, oiled wool thoughtfully. He'd forgotten all about it when he'd left it in the boat to haul Captain aboard the ship. He wasn't sure how he should feel about it showing up here, but he put it out of his mind.

It was warm, anyway.

The captain was prescribed serious bed rest by the ship's doctor, so the ship was under the dubious direction of Steelmind until he was able again.

Steelmind was still something of a mystery to Ren. It was obvious that he was an integral part of the crew, but Ren didn't really understand how he fit. Mostly, he seemed to creep around, frightening people. Sometimes he shuffled slowly down to the galley to twitch and claw at his bandaged arms alarmingly, but he rarely said anything.

When Ren saw him, usually all he could remember was Icecharm's bland commentary, "Today he killed sixteen bounty hunters."

He didn't get it, but he stayed out of his way.

Steelmind had informed the rest of the crew that they would be putting in at port to exchange their stolen bits of cargo for more useful equipment and supplies. The course Snowscar charted was smooth and easy, and the weather and winds held perfectly: the sunlight warmed the deck and the winds stayed fast and sure on the sails.

Ren found that the ship functioned equally well under the temporary regime. He reported to Icecharm daily for a rough inspection of the wound on his back (usually followed by a gentler examination of his nose, and a quick perfunctory prod at the fast-knitting injury to his leg), and then he spent his days doing what work he could on the ship - mostly deck-scrubbing, fetching, sail-mending, errand-running and chopping onions, as it turned out.

They weren't very exciting tasks, but the sunlight was bright and warm on his skin, the sea air was clean and cool, and he was fed regularly and got as much onion soup and lime jam as he wanted - although, as it turned out, after a few weeks his appetite for onion soup had waned enough that he could usually get by without a second helping.

They put in at Port Goodwill under a shining sun.

Port Goodwill was not precisely lawless, but it had a bustling dock, an extremely fluid population and no street lightning. Large sums of money changed hands and greased palms, not all of it willingly, and even less of it legally.

The crew of the _Merry Recidivist_ gathered in the galley. Captain was present, standing against the wall with dark shadows under his eyes, looking pale and anaemic. He gestured vaguely to Steelmind and Snowscar. "Silk, gems and spices - and any other stuff we have no use for. Steelmind doubtless has a list. Highest price for the fastest sale."

Steelmind twisted the edge of one of his bandages between his fingers and nodded carefully, like he was afraid his head would fall off if he overbalanced it. Ren amused himself with that mental image for a few moments.

"Meredith, Blacktrance. We need to know more about that ship, and what they were doing at Justice. Find what you can. Take Ren with you," he added after a moment's pause.

Ren looked up at that. Meredith raised an eyebrow at him and winked.

"Icecharm," Captain went on, rubbing his forehead. He produced a piece of paper with some fancy calligraphy on it, "I know from experience that some of these physicks and medicines won't be even remotely affordable, no matter how useful they'd be, so you're going to have to go to the apothecary yourself, and prioritise."

Icecharm leaned over the table and took the sheet of paper from him. "Please sit down, Captain. You have to rest your leg," he said by way of response, flicking it open and glancing over the writing as if to remind himself of its contents.

Captain gave him an annoyed look. "Deathscream -"

Icecharm set his big black bag on the table with a purposeful clatter. He withdrew a toothed saw with a lovingly polished ebony handle.

He set the saw on the table with a heavy _thunk_.

The crew looked at it.

Hellwrath shoved a stool at Captain, who sighed heavily and sat upon it. "As I was saying," he said, shaking his golden hair back over his shoulder, "Deathscream, you can go with him in case Icecharm manages to get lost or mugged - or recognised."

 _Recognised_? Ren mouthed to Meredith, who shook her head dismissively.

Deathscream grunted an affirmative. She was a looming shadow in the far corner, hard-edged and ugly. Ren made the extra effort of not looking at her.

"And Hellwrath can stay here and keep watch while I take more poppy syrup and go back to sleep," he added, sighing. "Are we all clear?"

"Aye, Captain," mumbled the crew.

"Then go. I'm going back to bed."

They disembarked from the _Recidivist_ and headed for the nearest filthy dockside pub, which Meredith seemed reasonably familiar with, and which was called The Queen's Legs. It was rough, mostly timbre, and filled with people who by and large smelled bad and desperately needed to launder their clothing.

Even though Ren was watching, he had very little idea as to how they quickly came to be seated at a table, drinks in hand, listening to a very old sailor regale them with tales of adventure and, largely, evil scumbag pirates.

"Pirates!" Blacktrance said, touching his fingertips to his lips in exaggerated shock. "Heavens."

"Quite right, m'boy," growled the old man, leaning forward. Ren did not think much of his breath, and he wondered how much expertise this man really had on pirates.

But Meredith somehow turned the conversation from pirates in general to one specific ship in particular.

"Oh, aye, the _Nimble Fingers_ 's a pirate ship alright. An' blacker pirates there's rare been seen..."

"Really?" Blacktrance asked, pushing his own drink into the man's gnarled hand.

"They say the captain's a madwoman," he said in a low, terrible voice.

"Yes," said Blacktrance, "I rather thought she might be." From what he'd seen of her crew - and her hat - Ren did kind of agree with this assessment of Captain Malai.

"She never paid an honest coin for what she could steal, and that woman could steal anything with two ends - they say she stole the lost treasure of Snagov monastery," he whispered, "and spent it on a hat."

"On a hat," said Meredith, a bit flatly.

"Did you _miss_ the hat?" Ren asked her.

"Not if she was on our side of the island," Blacktrance muttered.

"It was a good hat," he said, dismissing any objections with a wave of his hand, "and she covered the top of it in honey, attractin' all the insects of the air to rest upon it," he went on, much to the dubious silence of the three pirates. "And when her hat was huge and ripe with the insects, birds came to eat them and got stuck in the honey, and she trapped them there. Captain Malai stole the birds from the sky to decorate her hat, and now she has the grandest hat of any pirate to sail the seas."

This declaration was met with silence. Ren was fairly sure the man was lying, but every time he felt certain he remembered the mountain of feathers on the woman's head and then he wasn't really sure anymore.

"Well, that doesn't really sound that scary, at least," said Blacktrance optimistically, glancing at Meredith, who just raised an eyebrow.

"Oh, my boy, you've got it wrong," interrupted the old man, tapping his forefinger on the table. "The captain's a wily bitch, but she ain't scary - she's got people to do that for her."

"Really?" said Meredith dubiously.

"Every man aboard that vessel's crafty, deadly and crazy to boot," the man assured them. "They say the ship's surgeon's a madman," he said, leaning forward. He exhaled noisily, and Blacktrance somehow didn't flinch. Ren did, and he was further away. "He's a killer forty times over. Cut up his victims and pulled out their insides. Well, obviously, his neighbours didn't care much for his entertainin'."

"Goodness, I should think not," Blacktrance breathed, leaning forward to listen more closely. Ren glanced at him, wondering if he wasn't laying it on just a little thick.

"Imagine the smell," Meredith said, wrinkling her nose. "Eugh."

Their friendly drunk grinned at her, flashing a mouth more full of holes than teeth. "Well, they pooled their gold and called for a bounty hunter, an' when he knocked on that man's door, the madman drew him in and killed him like the rest."

"Ah," said Meredith. "And then I imagine the good thief-taker's colleagues noticed he was missing," she suggested.

"Aye, they did." The old man nodded. "Didn't stop the madman surgeon, though, did it? He thought it was grand fun, and nothing could be done. But as each new bounty hunter showed up swelled and face-down in the river, more an' more people moved away in fear of their lives."

"As you would," Blacktrance agreed, tapping his chin.

"Well, when people die it's one thing, but when business is affected in what you'd call a negative fashion, that's altogether another, ain't it? They dispatched the army, quietly, to take care of the surgeon within the month. As luck - or fate - would have it, the ship was leaving port that very night. When the soldiers came, the surgeon's house was dark and empty like he'd known for days, and the _Nimble Fingers_ whisked him away - and he never faced justice, and to this day that ship's never taken a prisoner what got out alive."

"Not big on the Hippocratic oath, then," murmured Meredith.

"Truly," agreed Blacktrance.

"Hangon, what about the big guy?" Ren asked.

"Built like a bear?" asked the man, eyes wide.

"Uh. I suppose so," said Ren, in lieu of saying 'no, built like me', because that was bound to cause some confusion. Meredith snorted back a laugh and patted his knee consolingly.

"He doesn't have no story," the man shook his head. "He's a demon called up from the depths of hell."

"Oh," said Ren, slowly. "Right."

"Who called him up?" Prompted Blacktrance, looking terribly entertained. "The Captain?"

"The sea witch," said the man in a voice that was more reverent than ominous. Ren frowned. "They say the navy was holding him captive, trying to force the secrets of the ocean out of him," the man went on carefully. "And he struck a deal with Captain Malai to use his witchings for her, if only she'd set him free."

"So presumably she sunk the marines' warship," Meredith prompted.

"Aye," agreed the man, nodding his head. "And now the witch works for her. They say he can coax the birds down from the trees and make rocks weep just by talking to them. They say the old gods of the sea looked upon such grace in his face that they gave their power to him freely, and that he can call the winds with a whispered whim."

Meredith and Ren both turned to look at Blacktrance.

"What?" he asked, frowning at them.

They shared a glance, and then turned back to the man.

"So," said Meredith, clearing her throat. "Anything else? For another drink? A cruel boatswain with a nine-tailed whip, perhaps? I always loved those stories," she added to Ren with a wicked little smile.

He looked between them and wet his lips. "Look, I don't know how true it is," he said slowly, and Meredith snorted softly while Blacktrance leaned in closer, "but the story goes that they took down a Perseverance Fleet Dreadnought last year. They let it chase them into a storm and dodged the lightning. The Dreadnought wasn't so lucky."

There was silence while they absorbed this story.

"You mean a Dreadnought, like a giant ship with three gun decks and a crew of six hundred?" Meredith asked slowly.

"It washed up off coast of the Sweet Mercy Isles about eight months ago," he said solemnly. "Still pieces of it for sale or salvage here and there, if you're looking."

"Hmm," said Meredith, and paid for his last drink with a sleight of hand and a flip of a coin. "Thanks for your help, cutter," she told him, and got to her feet.

Ren and Blacktrance followed suit.

That wasn't the only sleazy dockside bar they visited, or the only mad old man they spoke to, but the rumours were largely the same.

"That's ridiculous," Blacktrance said as they made their slow way back to the _Recidivist_ late that afternoon. They were walking down one of the less populated areas around the docks, full of slap-dash slums and grey, unlovely walls. There was mud instead of cobbles beneath their feet, and it seemed to get into everything. "I'm not going back to Captain and telling him that they have a _demon from hell_ aboard the ship."

" _That's_ the part of that you found most ridiculous?" Ren asked drily.

"Are you saying you found that reasonable?" Blacktrance challenged.

"I didn't find any of it reasonable, but at least people believe hell exists," Ren pointed out.

"The bit about the murderer was a good touch," he opined, pulling his dark hair away from his face and giving Ren a lopsided smile. "I don't doubt it was exaggerated, but you know what physicians are like."

Ren, did not, in fact, know what physicians were like.

Blacktrance looked at his expression. "They hover around hangings like vultures, waiting for the bodies to drop so they can cut them open and see how the insisdes work. It's not that far from there to killing your own."

Ren scrunched up his nose. _Gross._

Unbidden, the thought came to him and he wondered if Icecharm did that.

Meredith just sighed and rubbed her forehead. "I think it's better if we just let Captain know what was said. He can sort out the lies from the truths, if there were any actual truths to be had."

They reflected on this for a second, sunk in a kind of communal despondency.

Then, unexpectedly, there was a horrible noise of tortured rock from somewhere to Ren's right.

"Shit!" Meredith reached up and hauled Ren down by a handful of his hair. It hurt, but not as much as a chunk of bluestone to the head might have.

The wall heaved, and then rock broke and tumbled to the ground, showering them with loose mortar. The few other pedestrians disappeared like magic, long used to avoiding conflict in this city.

Ren blinked up from his new vantage on the ground, just in time to see Deathscream stumble through the broken patch of wall. Her shirt was ripped, leprous tattoos showing through on her dark skin, and she hauled a dishevelled Icecharm into the street by one arm after her. She dragged him over the broken stone and then pushed them both up against the nearest unbroken stretch of wall.

A woman stepped through after them. She was fit and sleek like some pale, ghostly cat, with heavy black hair tied into a tail dangling beneath her hat. She had a rifled pistol and a pair of impossibly polished black boots.

"Unhand my brother," she said, levelling her pistol at Deathscream.

They froze. Deathscream let Icecharm go and held her hands out. "I'm not forcing him to do anything," she said slowly. Then she hissed to Icecharm, "You could help by telling her."

"Oh," said Icecharm, stepping away from the wall and shaking the dust from his clothes. "Hello, Jasmine," he said.

There was a silence so awkward it almost seemed poignant.

"God," she said, much as though she hadn't heard him. "The whole family thought you were _dead_. And you went and got _kidnapped by pirates_ instead?" Her lips twisted into a bright smile, and she laughed. "Oh, Delphie. Kidnapped. By pirates. Of course."

Ren picked himself up, slowly, no sudden movements, but it seemed like the woman was only focused on Icecharm, and everyone else was only focused on her. That was good. Ren preferred days where nobody shot at him. He was aware of Blacktrance getting to his feet and shifting to put Ren's body between himself and the pistol.

"Actually an undergraduate student kidnapped me," Icecharm clarified, carefully not looking away from the woman. "The pirates sort of rescued me."

"And kindly put you to work on their ship," Jasmine drawled slowly.

There were a few seconds of silence. Ren wondered if he should move closer to the woman so he was in attacking range, or stay put so she wouldn't notice him. Meredith took hold of his elbow and shook her head minutely. They stayed still, watching. The woman obviously hadn't pegged them as shipmates yet.

"I..." Icecharm paused. "Yes?"

She gave him a pitying look. "Oh, sweetheart. What am I going to do with you?"

There was another of those silences. Then Icecharm opened his mouth again, but Jasmine beat him to it.

"It's okay," she sighed. Her aim with that pistol didn't waver in the slightest. It was a long time to hold it out and steady. She had practice. "I have a ship. You can come home with me on _The Best Defence_ and then we'll find a nice way to present this mess to mother so she doesn't disown you."

"He's not going," said Deathscream, baring her teeth in a snarl.

Jasmine's eyes flew back to her. She raised her pistol slightly. If she fired, they were no longer looking at a body shot. That bullet was going straight through her head. Ren felt Meredith's fingers tighten on his arm.

"This doesn't concern you, pirate," she said in a voice that went way past cold. "Except in that you can choose to live, or to die. I don't much care either way."

Deathscream stilled again, but her eyes flicked to Icecharm.

"You will have to give her my regards when you reach Perseverance, Jasmine," said Icecharm in that flat voice he used for virtually everything. Deathscream was moving, very slowly, but the woman's attention was fixed on Icecharm. "She was not much inclined to accept mine when we last spoke. Lower your pistol."

"No, I don't think I will." The look she gave Icecharm was furious. "Delphie, _come here_ ," she said, in a towering sort of voice, like you might use on a recalcitrant puppy.

Deathscream had continued her slow, careful movements, and now she took advantage of Jasmine's distraction with her brother.

Her long, tattooed fingers wrapped around Icecharm's arm and she yanked him between herself and Jasmine's pistol.

Icecharm did not, Ren noted, look terribly surprised. He didn't look terribly anything, actually.

"How about now? Do you feel like lowering your gun now?" Deathscream asked, smiling unpleasantly at her from over Icecharm's shoulder. She was a head taller, so Icecharm made a poor human shield, but she'd have to be extremely certain of her aim to fire now.

Blacktrance tugged on Ren's arm, drawing him slowly away from the confrontation. "They've got it under control," he said very quietly.

"Pirate _scum_ ," hissed Jasmine. She did not seem to be in any hurry to lower her pistol.

"You sure about that?" Ren asked, glancing at the trio. Deathscream's smile said that she did, indeed, have it all under control. Ren wasn't really certain.

"Let me put this another way," Blacktrance said, following his gaze. "How much do you feel like getting shot today?"

Ren looked down at Blacktrance, then back at the confrontation. He could see a second pistol sticking out the back of Jasmine's belt. "Okay," he acquiesced, and let Blacktrance lead him on.

Back aboard the _Merry Recidivist,_ Ren found that the sunny quarterdeck had been colonised by the captain, the quartermaster, the navigator and the navigator's cat. Their tiny blond captain looked like he was drawing something, and Snowscar alternated between scowling at a chart he'd brought above deck and scowling at Captain's paper. Steelmind stared hard at Captain's hands, and said nothing.

Cat was probably contributing the most, really, tail swishing back and forth as she watched the movement of Captain's hand. Ren saw the moment she went for the quill, but so did Snowscar - he yanked her out of the way by the scruff of her neck before either Captain or Steelmind could casually disembowel her for her efforts.

Hellwrath was further away, leaning over the starboard railing and scowling into the water.

"Is something wrong?" Ren asked cautiously.

"No?" Hellwrath looked up. Then he shrugged one shoulder. "I haven't been off the ship in a proper city in years. I get restless when we put in."

"Oh," said Ren. "Er, why not?"

Hellwrath jabbed himself in the chest with a thumb. "Wanted serial killer," he said. "Remember?"

Ren wasn't sure if he'd ever been told, but he supposed he could probably have figured it out for himself. "Oh," he said, "right. Well, you didn't miss much."

"The places that'd let me in aren't the same." Hellwrath shrugged, looking moodily out. "I'll feel better once we leave again in a few days," he assured Ren, waving one hand.

Meredith had crept up behind them, and now slid her tanned arms around Hellwrath's middle. "Bet I could make you feel better in a little less time than all that," she purred, pressing her teeth into his shoulder.

Distracted, Hellwrath turned to look at her. "Oh?" he raised one eyebrow.

Their faces were awfully close. Ren took a cautious step back. Maybe there was some deck to scrub. Actually, there was always some deck to scrub. Maybe he could find some on the other side of the ship.

Deathscream appeared out of nowhere and hurled a rope at Meredith's head. "No time!" She bellowed, and Ren was glad to see that she still had Icecharm with her - although now she was pulling him along with a heavy grip on the back of his collar.

He was less glad to notice that Deathscream was wearing a bandage made from the ripped remains of her shirt, and that she'd bloodied it rather thoroughly. There wasn't anything under her shirt, so he was able to see that her tattoos went all the way over her breasts, dark and ugly.

"You! Sails!" she added in a voice rapidly pitching toward a scream, waving one hand at her. "Capta1in. Captain! We need to weigh anchor immediately!" She roared it loudly enough for people on neighbouring ships to hear.

As she approached the quarterdeck, she finally let Icecharm go. He stumbled the sudden release, and almost toppled with the swell of the waves. Ren caught him by one arm.

"Steady."

"I'm fine," he said in a hard voice, and followed Deathscream's stalking, angular form. She was clutching at her shoulder now, as though just remembering that she'd been injured the whole time.

Within minutes the order was given to weigh anchor, and then they were unexpectedly but very swiftly off.

"What happened?" Captain finally asked, one chaotic hour later.

Deathscream shook her head, and explained about the woman who'd caught up with them in the city. "Bitch had eyes like a hawk and the devil's own luck," she added. "I _never_ thought she'd take that shot."

"I thought you said he was between you and her?" Captain said. He looked weary, perched on the edge of the quarterdeck with his injured leg straight out along the wood.

"He was. He's not big enough," said Deathscream, turning her scowl on Icecharm, who was inspecting her shoulder.

"Well, excuse me," said Icecharm,.

"Oh, shut up," said Deathscream, so reflexively that it lost most of its ire. "Nice fucking assist, by the way, Blacktrance," she added in a growl, as if she'd just remembered.

"I thought you had it under control," protested Blacktrance. "Big, tough thing like you, how could I think different?" his eyes conveyed whole worlds of innocent sincerity, largely feigned.

Deathscream spat at him.

"Well, _really._ "

"Enough," said Captain in a soft, gelid voice, and they both stilled. "What'd you find?" he asked, much more gently.

Slowly, each of the crew explained what had happened their few hours in port, and how they'd met - or not met - their assigned goals.

"So," said Captain, rubbing his forehead, "We have no medicines, three injured crew members, no _map_ and no idea as to what the hell the _Nimble Fingers_ was doing at that island, and little enough idea about the crew anyway - except that they're all demons from hell, magical sea witches, unstoppable thieves and, what was it? Oh, a mass murderer."

"To be fair," said Hellwrath, "that one's the most believable."

Captain sighed and ignored this. "Did we at least manage to pick up some supplies before we fled like frightened rats from one single woman?"

"Of the supplies on the list overall, not including those things required by the physician," Steelmind said, scratching jerkily at his cheekbone as he talked. It looked to Ren like he was trying to hook his nails underneath it, like he could lift part of his skull off on hinges. "We have acquired exactly none."

Captain sighed and his fingers on the deck. Steelmind twitched a little. "Fresh water?" Captain prompted.

"Two barrels."

Ren winced. Nobody else really reacted to the news, but faces looked grim.

"And we have no map, in case you'd forgotten," Snowscar repeated, a little too cheerfully. His eyes were a little unfocused, but he seemed more or less lucid.

"Yes, thank you, Snowscar, I believe we'd covered that. Right," said Captain, straightening. "This is quickly becoming dire. Snowscar, find us the nearest trade route. I don't care which. Then we need to find somewhere where we _can_ safely trade."

"We can hit the Perseverance-Charity route in two days. If we're careful, the water'll last that long," said Snowscar confidently. "And then on to Humility Isles, off near Temperance, I think. There's a good smuggling operation running out of those islets, and we should be able to get everything we need there, without making a big splash in Temperance itself."

Ren was pretty sure he was at least a little bit drunk, but everybody else was ignoring it so he did too.

There was a short, silent pause, during which the air thickened with a mix of tension and anticipation. Ren couldn't see them, but he was pretty sure he could _feel_ Hellwrath and Meredith smiling at the prospect of some mayhem.

Captain thought about this for a second, and then nodded. "Good. You've got it well in hand, then," he decided. "Deathscream, take the helm." And then he rose and limped away.

Snowscar gave their direction, and they set to work.

"Hey," Ren said to Hellwrath, when they were on course and moving with a swift wind. Hellwrath was perched precariously on the railing. He was sitting with his back against the mizzen mast, scowling at the old rope he was meant to be learning to splice. He wasn't very good at it. "I don't really understand something."

"I'm shocked," drawled the blond.

Ren decided to ignore that. "This ship isn't really very big, is it? Well, I mean, it's big, but it isn't really..."

"It's not a galleon, no. You noticed," Hellwrath said, raising an eyebrow. "How terribly astute of you."

Still ignoring. Ren was getting good at it. There wasn't really anybody aboard this ship who _wouldn't_ take a dig at him if he let them, and increasingly he let them because it was too exhausting to contemplate the alternative. "Well, doesn't that mean that virtually anything bigger will, you know, eat us alive? Because they'll have more guns?"

"Yes and no," said Hellwrath slowly. "You're right, in general. If we get into a gun fight with a bigger ship with more guns, we're toast unless we can run away."

He thought about the larger, better-armed shadow of the _Nimble Fingers_ and frowned. "But then..."

Hellwrath grinned. It was a decidedly unsettling expression. "If life was all about guns and ballast, we would be a suicidal guppy in a sea full of sharks, my friend." He clapped Ren on the shoulder, and Ren winced reflectively, even though the injury didn't really hurt anymore. "Happily, life on _this_ ship is largely about getting close enough, fast enough, to board and annihilate them while they're still fucking around with the guns."

Ren nodded slowly. "Okay. Annihilation," he tasted the word thoughtfully. "I can get behind that."

Hellwrath's hand tightened a little on his shoulder. "Good man."

Ren sighed and put the ropes down. "I can't do this. Blacktrance has shown me _five times_ , and I still can't do it. Is there some reason you can't just knot the ropes?"

Hellwrath glanced down at the ropes in his hands. "You are making a pretty shocking mess of that," he agreed. "And, yes," he added, "but I don't really get it so you'd have to ask Meredith. Or Blacktrance. But that'd mean telling him how badly you suck."

Ren scowled up at Hellwrath, who shrugged. Ren just sighed.

"Sail, ho!" Blacktrance wasn't in the crow's nest, but he was up in the rigging, balancing barefoot on the wood. Now he had one hand on the fore topgallant mast for balance, the other shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun on the water. "Captain!" He yelled, reflexively, and then, "Steelmind!"

"Seriously?" Ren asked, looking toward the ship's bow. He stood and peered, but he couldn't yet see anything on the horizon.

"Yep," Blacktrance called down. "Three masts. Merchant basque, not much bigger than we are."

Steelmind's shock of red hair appeared, apparently from nowhere, and he lurched toward the helm, where Captain was already quietly talking to Deathscream.

"Excellent," said Hellwrath, with feeling. "Want me to show you how we arm the gun deck?"

Ren frowned. "I thought you said -"

"I said they weren't the end all, not that they weren't important," Hellwrath yelled over his shoulder, disappearing below. Ren scrambled to follow him, rope forgotten .

The _Recidivist_ had sixteen 'guns', by which Hellwrath referred to the heavy, smooth-bore cannons which they set to fire through port-holes. Meredith happened upon them within minutes, and together it didn't take them long to become armed and ready.

Then Meredith dragged him above to wait and watch for the hint of white sails approaching.

"How is this going to work?" Ren asked, frowning.

"Well," she called down to him, already scrambling up the foremast, "We're a lot more manoeuvrable, so we're -" she hit the topmast and took a moment to catch her balance. "We're going to cut in front of them - our guns will be facing their prow."

"Yeah," Ren said slowly. "But..." Their ship was solid, reinforced, and very well-cared for. It felt very fragile under Ren's bare toes.

"Yeah, it's not always the best tactic, but a merchanter like that won't manoeuvre quickly. We'll present a small target, and the guns'll let us get close enough to board. And we're running out of water. Look, don't stress about it!" Meredith said, perched on one of the horizontal beams and smiling down at him. From the deck, his view was mostly of her legs. He didn't really mind. "Steelmind, Hellwrath and Deathscream will hop on over and start killing people until they surrender."

That sounded like a better plan than most plans. Ren still frowned. "Am I supposed to go with them?"

"If you think you can get over there, sure," said Meredith cryptically.

The other ship did, at length, appear on the horizon. Ren wasn't sure how they managed to build such speed as they approached the barque, but their ship seemed to be flying through the water.

When the sails were distinct and visible, Captain turned from the helm to face them. His voice was steady and calm, even though he looked pale and sickly. "We cut them off, fire quickly, and you, you, you and you board," he said, pointing at Hellwrath, Blacktrance and Steelmind in turn, and then putting the flat of his hand on Deathscream's back. "Ren, Snowscar, Meredith - you're with me here. Snowscar, Meredith - the guns. And tell Icecharm to keep out of the way," he added almost absently.

Snowscar snapped a lazy salute. He and Meredith disappeared below deck.

Captain turned back to the helm, leaving Deathscream free to ready herself for mayhem. He turned and glanced over his shoulder.

"Oh!" He added with a vague and unfocused smile. "And hoist the colours."

Deathscream laughed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're reading this story, I'd like to know what interests/pleases you about it. Let me know in a comment. :)


	4. Small Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Is that rust?" he squinted, reaching forward to turn the lancet over.
> 
> "Yes," said Icecharm indifferently. "But the chisel is clean..." he dug in the bag for a second, and then pulled out a saw. "And the saw is clean," he said, expressionless, as he ran fingertips over the saw's teeth. The teeth didn't nick his skin, which was clean and very white, and looked soft and vulnerable against the hard metal edge. "And blunt," he added.
> 
> "That's... bad?"
> 
> Icecharm's eyes flicked from the saw to Ren. "Would you rather suffer through an amputation with a blunt saw, or a sharp saw?" he asked drily.
> 
> "I'd prefer to keep my foot," Ren said.
> 
> "Duly noted," Icecharm nodded, and put the saw away.

The colours of the _Merry Recidivist_ involved no stylised bones or red paint. Their flag was just black. Ren looked up, saw the stark colours snapping in the wind and thought: _So I guess I'm a pirate now_.

It was obvious the second the merchant basque saw the black flag because Ren could actually hear the faint sounds of yelling and panic from their ship. He wondered what it meant that they'd been allowed to get so close before anybody raised the alarm - especially if what Snowscar said was right and their ship _looked_ like a pirate ship. The merchant ship had not been on the look out for pirates, or they'd have been wary earlier.

It seemed like it was only a few seconds until the prow of the ship was looming, her sweet-smiling figurehead right there in front of them. Ren's pulse picked up still higher, and he felt jittery down to his toes. The ships were far too close for the comfort of either crew.

"Snowscar!" yelled Captain in a voice like cracking ice.

Ren felt the vibration in the timbers beneath his feet when Snowscar and Meredith ran the guns out, and then the percussive shudder when they fired them, two each in quick succession: _crack-boom, crack-boom._

Noise flooded the world. The sound of splintering wood drowned out Ren's thundering heart for a second, and then there was the whip-whistle of ropes and the heavy thumping of boots. Voices yelled, conflicting and competing to such a degree that they were largely incomprehensible.

The figurehead's sweet face was obliterated. The air was thick with the smell of powder. Splinters of wood streamed from the sites of impact.

Boarding looked tricker than Ren had anticipated, and he immediately gathered why Captain had deemed him fit only to stay and help guard the ship this time. Deathscream and Hellwrath seemed to haul themselves onto the deck of the other ship through main strength alone, and Blacktrance executed some extremely acrobatic manoeuvre that started with him clinging to the topgallant mast and ended with him landing on his toes and one hand on the deck of the merchantman.

He looked around for Steelmind.

When his eyes found him, Ren stared.

Steelmind was still aboard the _Recidivist_ , but not for long. His body twisted with an unpleasantly brassy sound, and Ren fancied that he could hear the man's low, steady heartbeat swell through the wood of the ship for a second. Then with a lurching, popping movement, he coiled and hurled himself at the other ship and climbed along the timber with his body shifting and contracting like a train of fleshy clockwork, until he was clinging to their bowsprit.

Somebody aboard the merchantman screamed. Ren did not blame them.

From the bowsprit, Steelmind launched himself quite unexpectedly into their rigging. Pistols fired, but they did little but rip holes in the merchantman's sails.

"We're presenting a target! Hard to port!" Snowscar dashed past, pale hair fluttering, and nearly ran headlong into Captain, who was already at the helm. Captain gave him an unimpressed look and directed them steadily to the left.

The merchantman returned fire as the _Recidivist_ sailed past and briefly into range. There was a heavy _boom_ , and an uncanny cracking noise as cannon balls smacked into the ocean. Ren flinched under a spray of salt water.

They sped past, angled expertly away from the broadside, until they were out of range of the more manoeuvrable guns available to a mid-class merchant ship - which Ren quietly suspected wasn't a lot.

Nobody tried to board the _Merry Recidivist_ , because they were too busy fighting for their lives _._ Ren got to stand around, looking big and scarred, and watch the fight as best he could from the main deck.

Ren couldn't tell if the bright sprays of arterial blood were the work of Hellwrath or Steelmind, but they were frequent, messy and reasonably efficient. He could see a dark silhouette sprint along the merchantman's starboard railing to - rather easily - break into the officers' quarters. That was probably Blacktrance. Sailors, businessmen and mercenary guards dropped with equal and astonishing ease.

The _Recidivist_ lurched as Captain wheeled her back around, slopping Ren's onion breakfast around in his stomach. The wind and sparkling waves offered more resistance to the turn, and the ship slowed.

By the time they were close again, carefully broadside to the larger ship, Blacktrance was perched somewhere up on the topmast with the ship's colours wrapped around his shoulders like a large, ugly shawl. Ren couldn't see his face clearly, but his laughter was gleeful.

Hellwrath was lining sailors up on the main deck. His arms were red to the elbows, blood splashed over the bridge of his nose. It spattered on the deck as he gestured imperiously.

Short of scrambling up into the rigging, Ren's spot was the best for viewing the goings on on the other ship, and while Captain climbed the ropes and wood to a better vantage point like a cat, Snowscar came to settle by Ren. "Hmm," he mused, pulling out a brass spyglass. "That's quite a lot of men to surrender."

Ren shifted his bare feet, which were wetter than he liked. It happened a lot on a ship, he'd noticed. He couldn't count the men.

"Is that bad?" he asked, turning his head all the way. Snowscar had, deliberately or not, arrived on his right side - the blind one.

Snowscar scratched his chin. "There're slave smugglers on the Humility Isles. We might sell them. So I suppose it depends on how much you object to slavery."

"Um," said Ren. He glanced back at Snowscar, craning his neck once more. Snowscar, he decided, was mildly drunk. Not drunk enough to cause problems. But still... just a little.

"Well. Some people were raised in an environment of repression, shame and moral absolutism," he was saying with a sniff. "It's really very difficult to rehabilitate them."

Ren didn't understand the last comment, and began to suspect that Snowscar was actually a lot more educated than he'd guessed initially, even for a navigator. To be fair, everybody who could write seemed very educated to Ren. He decided to disregard that part and thought about the words preceding it.

Slavery was, of course, inherently a bad thing. But...

"I don't think I care enough to do anything about it," Ren said carefully.

"An honest man!" And, yes, all right- Snowscar was definitely a _little_ drunk. "Yes, most of the _moral absolutists_ feel the same way, ultimately," Snowscar said with great disdain, and then shrugged. "Pirates," he said, waving a hand helplessly, as if to ask, _what can you do?_ "Our moral stance is usually laying down."

"And that bothers you?" Ren wondered.

"Not at all. I'm a good pirate." He glanced sideways at Ren. "Just don't let it get to you. They're not really people. People," he confided, very firmly, "are people on the _Recidivist_. Everybody else is fair game."

That was a very clear line to draw.

"I can live with that," Ren shrugged.

Snowscar clapped him on the shoulder. "Good pirate," he said, in much the same tone he commended his cat on catching a rat. As if the sound of that tone had summoned her, Cat sprang from nowhere to claw her way up Snowscar's clothing and settle, purring, onto his shoulder. "Of course," he added absently, going back to his spyglass, "It does mean that you'll be sharing the hold with a bunch of stinking, wailing, terrified slaves. Might want to get right on that."

Ren held hopes that Captain or Steelmind would decide it was too much effort to take the remaining sailors, but these were thwarted in short order. He decided to take Snowscar's advice to heart instead, and forcibly regard the crew of his own ship as the only real people there were. He didn't know what that made everybody else. He decided he didn't care.

Steelmind was in full voice on the main deck, a thing Ren had not seen before, and did not much want to see again.

He was bloodied, not the way Hellwrath was, but in bright slashes and splashes of red. At some stage it had sprayed over his face. It would not clash with his hair until it started to dry. He moved with a shaking, insectoid lurch, and jabbed his twisted-looking finger into Deathscream's chest. "I have not finished inventory," he said in a voice that could probably be heard on the other ship. His eyes flared brightly, white and uncanny. "Inventory is more important than your whimpering slaves. Inventory is, largely, more important than you. _Get back there_ and tell them that if Hellwrath can't hold off on murdering everyone for another hour or two - we don't need those men that badly."

Deathscream's tattoos warped with her facial expression. Ren felt his own muscles go tense, an involuntary coiling in response to the potential for violence. He could almost taste it, like thunder on the air.

"Stand down, Deathscream," said Captain. Ren looked up. He was unused to seeing their tiny blond captain in the rigging, but he looked like he fit there, poised and balanced.

Deathscream paused for a long second. She opened her mouth. "Kirra - "

"Pick your next words very carefully, sailor." Captain's voice was soft, but it washed over them like a fall of icy water. Ren's skin prickled, and then crawled like it desperately wanted to flee. From the corner of his eye, Ren saw Snowscar take a step back, fingers twitching for the railing. He glanced around and found the wary eyes of those on deck all fixed on their tiny, angelic-looking captain.

Deathscream stared up at him for a few long moments. Then she turned away from Steelmind and spat.

"Wise," Captain smiled a tiny smile. The feeling broke. Ren exhaled slowly. "Get back over there and don't let Hellwrath start killing them," he waved a hand negligently, a gesture Ren suspected was meant to encompass all the bloody murder and mayhem he anticipated from Hellwrath.

Ren glanced over to the other ship, much closer now, with heavy ramps and ropes strung between the two for the convenience of transferring cargo. Blacktrance and Hellwrath were standing idly on deck, keeping an eye on the men who had surrendered.

Deathscream snapped a lazy salute and stalked back to the other ship.

"Smartly, Steelmind," Captain added. "Say what you like, but we really could use the income right now."

Steelmind grunted and got to work.

"Now," Captain wondered, frowning and poking at his injured leg, "how am I going to get down?"

"How... how did you get _up_?" Snowscar asked, moving closer to the captain.

The blond touched the tip of his index finger to his lower lip. " _Hmm_ ," he said, in lieu of answering.

Ren left them to it and went to help move the new supplies. Trying to complete a job under Steelmind's intent and critical gaze wasn't the best work-related experience he'd ever had, but it was soon over.

Then there was the depressing procession of slaves. They looked shaken, white-faced and frightened.

"Some of them are injured," he said to Meredith, who'd come up from the gun deck, and was leaning next to him against the starboard railing. "Do they need to get those looked at?"

Meredith cut him an uncommonly unimpressed look. There was a smudge of soot on her cheek, and for the first time he really _noticed_ the hard muscles under her tanned, sleek skin. He'd seen them, but he hadn't been paying attention. She had scars, too. "Perhaps we should send the physician to look after the bilge-rats, too," she drawled. "Or - oh, do you think the onions need medical attention?"

"All right," Ren said, raising his hands for peace. "Okay. It's just, they're people, and they're injured, so -"

" _Cargo_ ," she snapped. Her voice was hard and brittle. "You're people. I'm people. They're _cargo_."

"Oh," said Ren, suddenly getting it. Cargo. It made it a lot easier to watch when Blacktrance, Deathscream and Hellwrath casually strip searched them on the deck, and, declaring them free of anything that might be useful for injury or escape, escorted them to the hold.

She sighed, uncrossed her arms, and punched him gently in the bicep. "You're doing good, stud. Just... don't think so hard. It's bad for your health."

Sound advice, Ren figured. He watched the last of the dishevelled men disappear below-deck under Hellwrath's hungry-eyed supervision. "Hey," he said then, abruptly, "where else can I sleep?"

Meredith cocked her head. "There's space in with us," she shrugged.

"Is there anywhere on board where I might not have to listen to you having it off every night?"

"Depends how good your ears are, doesn't it?" said Meredith with a wicked smile.

Ren rolled his eye.

"Yeah," she said, scratching the inside of her elbow. "There's another cabin for crew - but Snowscar has his own, Icecharm's in the sick room and Blacktrance sleeps in the crow's nest," she waved one hand up at the topsail vaguely.

Ren frowned. "So it's Deathscream and Steelmind?"

"Deathscream's in with us," Meredith shook her head. Then she smiled, "She sleeps like the dead. Or maybe she just likes to watch?"

Blacktrance returned from the depths of the hold carrying the battered, marine-issue coat Ren had been using as a blanket. "Don't forget this," he said, tossing it over.

Ren wondered if Blacktrance would mind sharing the crow's nest. But the swell of the waves seemed like it would be pretty sickening that high up, amplified by all that space between the deck and that little wooden perch. And rolling over mid-nap would end in a drop that seemed pretty likely to hurt. So probably not.

Deathscream came out of nowhere and smacked him over the back of the head, open-handed, as she walked past. "Decks need swabbing. Stop standing around with your dick in your hand and get to it."

Ren blinked down at his pants. "What?"

Meredith snorted back a laugh. "It's a figure of speech, stud. Means you're wasting time."

Ren shrugged and went to pick up a brush and bucket. He'd done worse work than deck-scrubbing in his life.

Deathscream conferred with Captain for a few long minutes, following which she swung and climbed her way over to the ship, ensured they'd scavenged all but the skeleton, and cheerfully set it on fire.

She was whistling when she returned.

It burned for a long time on the horizon, and even when it disappeared, ominous black plumes of smoke continued to drift toward the clouds.

The decks didn't really seem to get much cleaner for all Ren's scrubbing, but it gave him something to do and it meant that nobody bothered him with other work until the sun set and he couldn't see what he was doing anymore. Then everybody kept out of Steelmind's way as he lurched around deck setting lanterns, and Ren went down to collect his bowl of onion soup.

The crew crowded into the available space, leaning against walls and tables to devour the tasteless fare. Icecharm appeared to be making an inventory of his own: a black bag of heavy leather had been recovered from the merchant ship, although its owner was long dead and burned. He drew out a long, flat leather wallet, which when opened revealed a frankly terrifying array of surgeon's tools: a lancet, a bone chisel, several needles, a scalpel and a cauterising iron.

Ren stared at them, fascinated and horrified, as the rest of the crew talked and ate.

"Is that _rust_?" he squinted, reaching forward to turn the lancet over.

"Yes," said Icecharm indifferently. "But the chisel is clean..." he dug in the bag for a second, and then pulled out a saw. "And the saw is clean," he said, expressionless, as he ran fingertips over the saw's teeth. The teeth didn't nick his skin, which was clean and very white, and looked soft and vulnerable against the hard metal edge. "And blunt," he added.

"That's... bad?"

Icecharm's eyes flicked from the saw to Ren. "Would you rather suffer through an amputation with a blunt saw, or a sharp saw?" he asked drily.

"I'd prefer to keep my foot," Ren said.

"Duly noted," Icecharm nodded, and put the saw away.

"Thank you," said Meredith, startling Ren and plopping her bowl down next to the needles, "it was extremely inoffensive." She took hold of Hellwrath's half-full bowl while he was eating and put it down as well, then pulled him away by his hair. He sucked the soup off his spoon and tossed it into the bowl before she dragged him out of range, but went without protest, a sliver of a smile on his face.

Captain headed out next, taking a bowl of soup that was presumably intended for Snowscar, who was still on deck and keeping an eye on the helm and horizon. The rest of the crew trailed off quickly after, leaving Ren and Blacktrance picking at their food. After a few minutes longer, Icecharm finally got up to put a bowl down outside the door for Steelmind.

Blacktrance glanced after him, and then peered curiously into the bag. Then he frowned and pulled out what looked like a very moldy piece of bread. "Uh," he said, holding it out. "Is that a surgeon thing?"

Icecharm swept back and pried it out of his fingers. "Yes," he said flatly. "Although it suggests that your physician was apprenticed, not taught at one of the great learning centres. This," he held the moldy bit of old bread up in front of Blacktrance's nose, "could be useful, or it could be lethal," here Blacktrance flinched back. "It, and a number of other things which have of course gone completely unlabelled, will need to be examined."

"It's _blue_ ," Blacktrance said.

"Yes, it is blue," Icecharm agreed, either oblivious to or ignoring the implied protest in Blacktrance's voice. "That is largely how it is identified by the witch-doctors who use it." He put it away in an oilskin bag and stored it in a box. He looked up at the pair of them. "Do neither of you have anything important to do?"

"I do," said Blacktrance immediately, and left, boots clattering.

"He doesn't," said Ren, listening to his hastily retreating steps.

"I didn't think he did, no. You do, though," said Icecharm. "You've lost your bed. Unless you are staying in the hold?"

"Didn't plan to. And... it wasn't really much of a bed. More like... floor space. I'm sure I can find some of that in plenty of places.". But he took the hint and left, looking for somewhere more appropriate to spend the night.

Actually there weren't that many places. A lot of the places on the ship seemed to be above deck, which was cold and windy and frequently subjected to sprays of saltwater. He had no idea how Blacktrance managed.

Eventually he decided to brave Steelmind. The other man was extremely quiet and evidently preferred not to be disturbed, traits which, in a bunkmate, seemed like they'd suit Ren down to the ground.

He thumped on the door open-handed, and then opened it. "Um, hey," he said, leaning hip-shot against the frame and looking around the room.

Steelmind kept his things in a chest against the wall, next to which was coiled a pile of metal chains. They were tiny and finely-wrought, heavily threaded with coins and metal knots and little brass gears. It was too big a pile to be jewellery, despite how pretty it was. It took Ren a few seconds of staring to realise that they were bound together in a wooden handle, and that he was looking at a nine-tailed whip.

He blinked away quickly, eyes skimming past Steelmind perched on his bolted-down bed with a sheaf of paper and a swift-rattling steel abacus. The room was filled with clocks, and pieces of clocks: cogs and gears and little screws and other bits of polished metal Ren had no words for. They were nailed into the walls, strewn across the tiny desk. Bare escapements gleamed in the lantern's glow.

They _ticked._ All of them. All out of time with each other. Together they made a shuddering mechanical sigh that was almost musical.

Looking at the room, Ren nearly reconsidered asking, but at length he said, "Can I sleep in here?"

Steelmind's white eyes fixed on him for a second. "You were in the hold with the stores," he said finally. A muscle in his cheek was ticking.

"Yeah."

"You don't want to sleep with the slaves?"

"Not really." Ren shrugged uncomfortably. "You said 'slaves'," he added. "Not 'cargo'."

Steelmind's met his eye. His gaze was more or less entirely hollow. "They are what they are. Flesh, largely." He turned his eyes back to his list, scratching rhythmically at his bandaged wrist. "And consequently, dying. What do I care?"

"Right. Fair enough." Ren wasn't touching that. He didn't need to delve any deeper into the goings on behind Steelmind's eyes.

"You can, if you need somewhere to sleep," Steelmind said after a long, twitching silence. "You are quiet enough."

"Very quiet," Ren assured him, stepping over a stray bit of clockwork. He pushed the door closed behind him and found a quiet corner to curl up in. He covered most of himself with his marine-coat blanket.

Once he was done with his list, Steelmind turned down the lantern and plunged the room into darkness. There was some light, once Ren's eyes had adjusted: a very soft ray of starlight through the porthole. It made the clockwork glitter faintly in the dark.

Ren sighed softly and tried to get to sleep. It was surprisingly easy, even with the noises of Steelmind twitching and scratching three feet away from him in the blackness.

He woke to more light and the grating sound of metal on metal.

It took him a few confused minutes to determine that the noise was _filing_. The light was very dim, low and warm. He could make out Steelmind's twisted silhouette. He couldn't tell what it was that he was filing, but from the movement it was a lot larger than any of the timepieces in the room. The file rasped forward, Steelmind lifted the tool, and then it rasped forward again.

The sound blended with the mechanical ticking, cutting through the sound in an agonising counterpoint.

Ren wondered if Steelmind would stop if he asked.

Probably not.

He lay listening to the sound for quite some time. The clocks ticked, and the file rasped a demonic counterpart, and the light flickered and flashed with the rocking of the ship and the rocking of Steelmind's trembling silhouette.

He waited. The quartermaster did not stop. After two or so hours, he began to mutter to himself.

Ren watched, and began to suspect that the man was filing _himself_.

He was fairly sure he didn't even notice when he got up, picked his way through the maze of soft-gleaming metal pieces on the floor, and left for pastures greener. Or if not greener, at least marginally less disturbing.

Perhaps he'd sleep in the galley. At least it was always warm in there, even if Icecharm was likely to trip over him at some ungodly hour and then lecture at him about making the place dirty.

It wasn't as dark as it ought to have been outside Steelmind's room. He blinked for a second, and then realised that the door to the galley was open and light was coming out.

So much for that plan. He paused in the doorway, trailing his coat and, he was sure, looking a bit pathetic. "Do you just not sleep?" he asked Icecharm.

"Not often," said Icecharm, apparently unaware that his question had been largely rhetorical.

"Can I sleep in here?" Ren asked wearily.

"Yes," said Icecharm. "But I will be in and out all morning."

"I so don't care," said Ren, and dumped himself in an out of the way corner. Icecharm silently ignored him.

He fell asleep almost immediately, but woke after a few hours to the sound of clattering brass.

The physician had taken the quietest hours of night to set up some kind of instrument which Ren could not quite fathom the purpose of. It was made of brass pillars screwed into a wooden block, with a plate of glass and an odd-looking lens between the wood and what looked like a tiny, finely-wrought spyglass at the top. Ren tried not to stare at it, but it wasn't easy.

Icecharm retrieved his piece of moldy bread - put away in the first place, Ren suspected, just to keep it out of Blacktrance's over-curious hands - and popped a tiny piece into the machine with steady, precise movements.

Ren gave up sleeping and sat up straighter to watch.

He looked through it, and fiddled with the set up of the machine, and then finally sat back and regarded the bread thoughtfully. In fact, Ren had never seen a bit of mouldy bread regarded _so_ thoughtfully.

"Is it, uh, whatever you thought it might be?" he asked, taking a guess as to what he was up to.

Icecharm did not let the sound of Ren's voice in the silence startle him. "With no reference materials, no information as to where it came from, and little clue as to the doctor's good character, it is hard to say. It may well just give you all ergot poisoning." He tapped the table, regarding exactly nothing with his blank eyes. "I could test it on Snowscar's cat."

"Er," said Ren, getting slowly to his feet. "What if you kill her?"

"It is a cat, Ren, not a person."

"Yes," said Ren slowly, perching on the edge of the table, "but Snowscar is a person. I mean, I'm pretty sure?" he amended. Sometimes Snowscar seemed not that person-like, like the vengeful avatar of the gods of booze and sarcasm. "And, you know, he is very attached to Cat."

"He has been attached, as you put it, to all of his cats. He's had seven."

There was a silent pause. Icecharm sat forward and peered through the spyglass bit again, and then continued his thoughtful consideration of the sad piece of moldy bread.

"And... did you test medicines on them all?" Ren wasn't sure he wanted to know, but he asked anyway.

"For science," Icecharm confirmed, putting his mold away. The tiny piece in the machine remained there for the moment. "You keep looking at my microscope. I understand you have no education at all?"

Ren blinked. "Well, yeah. I'd never really talked to anybody as rich as you before I came here," he pointed out.

" _I_ am not rich," Icecharm corrected him. "My relatives are very rich, yes, but I am not; I am a disinherited surgeon on an - occasionally derelict - pirate ship."

Ren twitched a little at the implication that a change in circumstances somehow made all of Icecharm's background moot, but he took the man's point. "Okay. Well, I can't read, and I don't know what a micro-whatever is."

"Micro _scope_. It's a word taken from Greek, which means," he stopped talking for a moment, thinking, and Ren was struck by the sudden realisation that he was translating the word in his head, "'small view', I suppose. Crudely put. The instrument makes small things look larger, so you can see more of their details. Like a very strong eyeglass, sort of." He paused. "Do you want to see?"

He tilted his head. "Sure, I guess."

Icecharm gestured him closer. The instrument was an elegant little thing, and even though Ren's hands were clean in a very relative sense, it looked very breakable when he laid them flat on the table to either side of he sat down, Icecharm was actually taller than him. Weird.

Very carefully, he looked through the top of the spyglass-part.

Then he sat back. "I don't understand," he said after a moment. "That's the same thing as the bread?"

"Amazing what you can't see with your eyes, isn't it?"

Ren looked over at the other man, who actually looked sort of blandly pleased. Ren hadn't seen his face look anything other than blank before. He couldn't really tell what had changed, but there was some miniscule difference. It suited him.

"But... Why can't we see it with our eyes, then?" he wondered.

"I'm not sure," the doctor admitted. "But I think if you could see that much detail with your naked eye, you would be easily distracted. Have you - Ah, you wouldn't have. There is a quote, 'Why has not man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, man is not a fly'."

Ren propped his chin on his hand. A lot of this education stuff seemed pretty bloody useless to him (although, the part where a guy could learn how to fix people who were sick? That was pretty alright), but he didn't mind listening to Icecharm talk. He had a good voice for it, low and soft and very cultured, and much more expressive than his face.

To be fair, though, some clocks had faces more expressive than Icecharm's. "So what does that actually mean?" he prompted.

"It means that we exist in the context of men, and not insects; in our context it is not useful to see so much detail, but it is useful for an insect. So we each have our vastly different eyes." He paused for consideration. "Of course, the whole poem is largely just the usual Protestant whining. Because a thing is, it must be right, and thus must not be changed," Icecharm said dismissively.

Ren thought about that for a long second. "Wouldn't that make surgeons kind of..."

"Obsolete? I suppose. It's a debate that's been ongoing for centuries - each new development more terrifying to conservatives than the last. Unfortunately we can't all be content to sit about waiting for syphilis to cave our faces in." He sniffed, like he was offended by the very idea.

"I've seen that," said Ren, thinking of the sad, wood-nosed whores plying their trade on the street corners back home, "it's really disgusting." And had basically terrified him out of all contact with the public stews and loose women for life. As threats went, 'your face will cave in' was a lot more effective than maybe going blind.

"The cure is very nearly worse," said Icecharm, which Ren wasn't sure he believed. How much worse than _losing your nose_ could it possibly be? Then again, maybe the surgeon just cut your nose off. He wouldn't know.

"Nobody I know could afford to see a doctor about it," Ren shrugged finally. "They just got happy when the sores went away on their own."

"That seems as likely to work as well as anything else," said Icecharm quite neutrally. "Except maybe that," he nodded at the box that held his bread. Ren wondered what was so amazing about mold, but held his tongue. Icecharm's steady gaze fell on Ren. "I don't think you're going back to sleep. You can sort and fold the linens we acquired, then," he said decisively. He glanced at Ren's hands, and his lips pressed into a thinner line. "I'll fetch the surgical spirit," he added.

Icecharm insisted he wash his hands several times, and even gave him a flat stare and a wire brush with which to clean under his nails. When Ren was finally clean enough for Icecharm's critical eyes, his hands were red and his skin was actually lighter than he remembered it.

"When was the last time you bathed?" Icecharm demanded, eyeing the difference between his hands and the rest of his skin. His face was expressionless, but Ren supposed his dismay was implicit. "This is why you people exist in a perpetual state of fever and infection."

Ren actually wasn't sure when he last bathed, unless having Icecharm pour saltwater and alcohol over his wounds counted. He remembered _that_ pretty clearly. "We're on a ship in the middle of the ocean. We haven't got the fresh water, or the abundance of spirits, to clean up to your standards," he pointed out.

Icecharm met his eye with a flinty grey gaze, but he let it go and turned to put wood in the stove to heat it for breakfast. Then he carefully disassembled and put away his microscope in the sick room, where nobody who wasn't in dire need of medical attention would venture.

Ren spent the next many hours at the table in the galley with the heat of the stove warming his skin, sorting out the linen which would be good from the linen which would be inappropriate, and cutting into the pieces to Icecharm's meticulous specifications.

His eyes drifted to the medical supplies Icecharm had piled into a pile to discard. These were the most damaged of those they'd retrieved from the merchants. He didn't know what prompted him to ask, but he did. "Have you ever cut off somebody's leg?"

Icecharm looked up from where he was mending the frayed edges of one of his bandages. His stitches were small, neat and fastidious. They had to be, Ren supposed. "Yes," he said.

That seemed like it was going to be it. Ren nodded and went back to his own pile of linen. Icecharm got up to start cutting onions. An hour later saw Blacktrance clattering into the galley.

"Good morning!" he beamed. "Breakfast! Is breakfast a thing yet?" he demanded, glowing at them with profound good humour. Then he looked more closely at Ren. "Have you been in here all night?" A pause. "Did you not sleep at all?"

"I slept."

"Oh, good. With Steelmind?"

"In here," Ren shrugged. "I don't think breakfast's done yet, though," he said.

Blacktrance pouted. "But I've been up all night! I'm hungry. Also Snowscar says we'll be at the Humility Isles by tomorrow morning, but that you'd better feed the cargo between now and then."

"I see," said Icecharm. "Breakfast won't be long. Less than an hour. Ren, I've kept you too long. Thank you for your help." A pause. "Breakfast will be less than an hour," he repeated.

Ren wondered what he was meant to do for less than an hour that was better than cutting bandages, but Blacktrance was looking at Icecharm, and then looking at Ren and back again, and Ren got the feeling that perhaps he didn't want to be a part of that look.

"Right," he said, scraped back his chair, and headed above.

Blacktrance followed him out. He waited until they were in the dark predawn air above deck before he turned and said, "That - seriously? - that is _adorable._ "

"Adorable?" Ren repeated blankly.

Blacktrance just laughed. Ren couldn't figure out what he was laughing _at,_ but after it went on and on, he assumed it to be himself. "Oh, Ren. Baby. _Icecharm_? You do know we call him that because he's as cold as a dead fish, right?"

Meredith dropped down from the rigging - apparently nobody else on this ship slept, either - and asked, "What are we talking about?"

"He stayed all night in the galley. Looks tired, doesn't he?" Blacktrance told her, beaming. "Making eyes at the surgeon," he cooed expressively. "Well, _eye_ , I suppose. Can you 'make eye' at somebody?"

"Ohhh," Meredith waved this away with one excited hand. "Oh, _yes_. Did you play doctor? Did he let you put your _filthy, dirty_ hands on him? I'll bet he bruises like a _peach_ ," she added raising her eyebrow to Blacktrance with an obscene little laugh.

The mental image of Icecharm's soft, white skin mottled with heavy black bruises was so unappealing that Ren wasn't even sure if their innuendo was meant to be sexual anymore. "What are you _talking_ about?"

"Don't be shy, stud," Meredith purred. "Friends don't keep secrets from friends."

"You - I - I couldn't sleep. I spent the night _folding bandages,_ " he protested. They didn't need to know about the thing with the microwhatever, he decided. That was... maybe private. He wasn't sure. He didn't feel good about sharing it though, so he didn't.

Meredith squinted at him. Blacktrance frowned. It was a lovely, delicate frown.

"Damn," he said.

"Yeah," she echoed. "Stud, I am _so_ disappointed in you."

"I," said Ren very firmly, "am going to continue washing your foul bloodstains off the deck. And then I am going to eat breakfast -"

"- and compliment Icecharm on his cooking again, obviously -" Blacktrance interjected in a low voice.

"Obviously," Meredith agreed.

"And then I am going to mend some sails and wait until you get to port and have something less ridiculous to distract yourself with," he finished as though he hadn't heard. "Or more ridiculous," he muttered. "I'm not fussy."

Meredith eyed him. "Shouldn't be long," she said slowly. Then she jabbed him in the chest with her index finger. "But you think about what I said," she instructed him gravely. " _Like a peach_."

"Ew?" Ren knocked her hand away and stalked off. He tried to ignore the way she and Blacktrance murmured to each other quietly as he did, but their combined gaze was heavy.

The day went exactly as Ren had planned, and he managed to completely avoid talking to Icecharm. Around dinner he decided this tactic was stupid, because Icecharm was the only member of the crew not invested in driving him mad or giving him shit.

He did not compliment his cooking, though. It really was pretty bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A reminder for those who may have forgotten -- there's no definite timeline for this story. It's in "chronological development of history what's that?" territory. There are anachronisms. Kind of a lot of them.


End file.
